UVU has an institutional license for Perusall, a social learning platform. Within Perusall, students interact together with books, articles, videos, and other assignments. It’s a group annotation software that can automatically grade students on the quality of their annotations and interactions, and it integrates with Canvas.

Adding Perusall to a course

1. In the Canvas course go to Settings > Apps
2. Search Perusall in the apps and add it to the course.
   1. You will need a consumer key and shared secret. Contact your supervisor for this information.
3. In Settings > Navigation drag Perusall up so it is enabled. Once it is in your left navication menu, you can easily access it as you build out the course and save.

If Perusall has not yet been added to your Canvas course, follow the instructions in this video:

Setting up a course in Perusall

Once you have integrated Perusall into your course:

1. Access Perusall from the link in your course sidebar.
2. Add files to your Library tab.
   1. Click the Library tab in Course home.
   2. Click the + Add content button.
   3. Select the type of content you would like to add. Note that you can choose a textbook, but students will be required to purchase the book from Perusall. (Perusall says they don’t make money from this—it costs the same as buying it elsewhere. They do this to comply with copyright law.)
   4. Upload or add the content. You can keep adding files, and/or leave the page while the upload is happening.

You can easily set up Perusall in a DEV shell and then the teacher can copy the Perusall course to their live course.

Creating assignments in Perusall

Once your files are uploaded to your library you can create your assignments:

1. Click on the Assignments tab in Course home.
2. Click + Add assignment.
3. In the Content tab, in the Content to assign drop down menu, select the file you would like students to annotate for the assignment. (Multiple files can be added by clicking + Add another part)
4. Assign page ranges or Assign all content as needed.
5. In the Options tab:
   1. Fill in the Submission deadline
   2. Create the Assignment name. Name your assignment exactly the way you want it to be named in Canvas; otherwise, it won’t connect correctly.
   3. Add any Instructions for students you would like to include.
      1. Best Practice: Add instructions in Canvas rather than Perusall so any necessary changes are made in only one place.
6. In the Scoring tab you can choose to have the assignment graded using the course scoring settings (see below) OR you can customize the settings for specific assignments.
7. Save changes and your assignment is created.

Settings and Scoring

1. Click on Perusall in the sidebar of your course. This will take you directly into the specific course’s Perusall page.
2. Click on Settings in the sidebar menu tab.
3. In the General tab, add your course information.
   1. Recommended setting for Grade sync to LMS is “Automatically sync individual assignment scores back to LMS”
4. In the Grouping tab, fill in the Enrollment estimate for the course. If you would like to split students into groups, specify the size of groups you would like them to be in. You can choose to allow Perusall to assign the groups, or you can choose to manually assign the groups and import them from Canvas, following the instructions in Perusall.
5. In the Scoring tab, read through the different scoring options and set them based on what makes sense for your course. When putting in assignments you can create individual scoring systems, but these settings serve as a base rubric for the course.

Adding assignments to Canvas

In Canvas, choose the module you would like to add the Perusall assignment to and then do the following:

1. Click the + button on the Module and create an assignment.
2. Name your assignment EXACTLY what it is named in Perusall.
3. Edit the assignment and change the submission type to External tool.
4. Select Perusall from the list and enter the consumer key and shared secret. (These may autoload after your first time entering them.)
5. Click the “Load this tool in a new tab” box and adjust your due dates.
   1. Best Practice: Make assignments in Canvas the same amount of points as they are in Perusall so the percentage pass back goes smoothly.
6. Save the assignment

Copying Perusall from DEV shell to live course (Or live course to new live course)

1. Add the Perusall app to the live course
2. In the Perusall Library tab, under +Add content, choose Materials from another course
   1. In Copy from, choose either “One of my courses” or “Another instructor’s course, using a copy code.” (The copy code can be found in Settings > Access)
3. Select the content and assignments you want to use.
4. If needed, adjust the deadlines by adjusting the first due date.
5. Choose whether you want instructor comments to copy over.
6. Copy course settings if you want all the settings (like scoring) to stay the same.
7. Select Save Changes.

Resources

• A Student’s Guide for Navigating Perusall
• Perusall Instructor Resources
• Perusall cheat sheet