TABLE OF CONTENTS
Overview
Perusall is a social annotation tool that allows students and faculty to interact with reading materials in a style akin to social media posting. Instead of reading a document and engaging with it via a separate discussion thread, Perusall brings the discussion to the text.
The tool allows instructors:
- to upload their own content and/or adopt a course textbook through the platform
- to create threaded discussions directly within the text (commenting, annotating, upvoting, and GIFs create a dynamic discussion directly alongside the text)
- to assign peer review assignments, where students can upload their own work to be analyzed by a peer using the highlight and comment feature.
Return Users - Instructions
Penn updated to the LTI 1.3 integration in May 2025, allowing for easier group and grade syncing.
Important: If you have used Perusall in the past and want to migrate content forward, please read this Perusall Step by Step migrating content guide on the best way to do that. You must use these instructions to prevent issues.
New Users - Instructions
We have made a step-by-step introduction to the tool below for Instructors using Perusall for the first time. If you have used Perusall in the past and want to reuse content, please see the content migration guide above.
To begin, add the Perusall button to Canvas Navigation
1. Click Settings in your left-hand course navigation menu.
2. Click the Navigation tab near the top of the page.
3. Scroll down, click the Perusall button, and drag it above the line that reads "Drag items here to hide them from students." Alternatively, you can click the three vertical dots on the right of the Persuall button > Enable.
4. Scroll down again to the bottom of the page and click Save.
Important: We recommend clicking into Perusall via this navigation button to sync the course with Perusall, which aids in quickly getting to Perusall while you decide on your global course settings, setting up assignments. Once these goals are accomplished, we recommend hiding this button again by repeating the steps above and selecting Disable in step 3. This way, students enter Perusall directly through your assignments and are brought to the assignment they must annotate.
Next step, the Getting Started Setup Wizard
Click the Perusall button. Instructors will be brought to a 6-step setup wizard that walks them through all of the options for setting up Perusall in the course. Although these settings can be adjusted at any time, we recommend setting these up before assignments are submitted so there are no grading inconsistencies.
Step 1 – Welcome - Select whether this is a new course or if materials will be copied forward from an already existing course that has used Perusall in the past. To copy content from before Summer 2025, please follow this Perusall 1.1 to 1.3 migration guide instead of the new Perusall user guide below.
Step 2 – Starter Assignments - To help students gain familiarity with this platform, Perusall offers a Syllabus upload option that can be configured into an assignment. It also offers a “Getting Started with Perusall” introductory assignment that shows how the platform works. We encourage instructors to take a look to see if either of these introductions to the platform would fit in the course, as both can be adjusted and deleted after.
Step 3 – Select Content - Perusall has a large collection of resources that instructors can purchase, but many of our instructors skip this step to upload individual items to the Perusall library after the wizard.
Step 4 – Student Costs (Payment)- Penn has an institutional license so instructors and students do not need to pay anything to access the platform, please select continue for this step.
Step 5 - Basic Settings - This is a very important step! This page helps the instructor decide what sort of grading, analytics, and group size they would like to use in their course.
- For more in-depth information about each of these options, please see Perusall Course Settings.
- For additional fine-tuning of the course, please see Perusall’s Customize My Course page.
We recommend paying close attention to three essential categories: Scoring and analytics, release scores to students, and the LMS gradebook columns management dropdowns. If you have questions about these categories, please email online-learning-help@sas.upenn.edu.
Step 6 – Ready to go! - This step just lets instructors know that since they started in Canvas, the roster will automatically be updated to reflect enrollment. Once the wizard is complete, the button on the bottom right will lead to the library. Instructors will add content to the library first and build assignments second.
Once the setup wizard is complete, Perusall may need some additional materials added to it. Please see below for typical workflows.
Adding Content to Your Course Library
Adding content to the course library should happen after completing the setup wizard.
- Click on Library on the course home page in Perusall.
- To add a book from Perusall's catalog, click Add > Textbook.
- To upload a reading (PDF or EPUB format), click Add > Documents from my computer or Add > Documents from Dropbox.
- To add a web page as a reading, click Add > Web page.
- There are several new additions to content types instructors can add.Please note that some of these additions, such as podcast, will require captioning or transcripts to be fully accessible to students.
Adding Your TA to Your Course
1. In Perusall, click on the Settings tab in the left-hand menu.
2. Once on the settings page, navigate to the Access tab.
3. Add TA’s email to “Invite Teaching assistant” box
4. Click Send Invitations.
Please Note: The TA will need to accept this invitation for access to Perusall. They will have permissions that the instructor grants them under the teaching assistant permissions area.
Review the scoring metrics in Perusall
Before starting to create assignments based on the library items, we recommend taking a look at the Automatic Student Engagement Analytics default that Perusall has set up. Essentially, the Automatic Student Engagement Analytics uses a “scoring template” that the instructor sets up as an “automatic rubric” for the assignment. During the setup wizard, instructors selected which overall scoring option they would like for the course. If they have selected any option with Automatic Student Engagement Analytics, they will want to take a closer look at the scoring templates now.
Perusall offers four options for Overall Scoring:
- Automatic grading, and Automatic Student Engagement Analytics
- Manual grading, and Automatic Student Engagement Analytics
- No grading, and Automatic Student Engagement Analytics
- Disable All Analytics
Automatic Student Engagement Analytics
To determine student engagement, Perusall breaks up each assignment into parts that are given weights by the instructor. Instructors can set the weights in scoring templates.
We recommend setting up the scoring template to be specific to what the instructor wants to assess in the course. For example, maybe an instructor is not leveraging quizzes, but they want a lot of annotations. That particular assessment goal can be configured in the scoring template to have different weights and then applied to all assignments in the course.
Please keep in mind that students will not see these analytics, so the instructor will need to explain what deliverables they would like to see in the assignment for full credit. Perusall recommends having the weights total be over 100%, so if students do not meet the exact criteria in one metric, they are still able to achieve a high score by excelling in a different metric.
For most courses, we recommend either “Manual grading, and automatic student engagement analytics” or “Automatic Scoring, and automatic student engagement” with manual grade release, as with either of these options, the instructor gets to look over the grades before releasing them to the students.
To learn more about scoring, please see Perusall’s Setting up and Controlling Course Analytics guide.
Creating Assignments
Once you have added content to your course library and decided on your student engagement analytics, you can start creating assignments.
- Click on Assignments on your course home page in Perusall. This is located at the top of the screen.
- Click Add assignment and select the type of assignment you are interested in.
- Once you select the type of assignment you will then select the document or artifact you want to assign.
- Please Note: For Peer Review or Fishbowl assignments, students will upload their own documents and group settings will not apply. Meaning, everyone on the roster can be chosen to be a peer. For more information on Peer Review, Fishbowl Assignments, and Instructor Review, please see Perusall’s Review-based assignment page.
- Select the part of the document to assign (if only assigning certain pages), specify a deadline, and click Save changes.
- Instructors can also stack and combine elements into one assignment, such as a document and a video. Please read more about building assignments in Perusall’s guide to creating and managing assignments.
- For the scoring section in Perusall, please select which Automatic Student Engagement Analytics should apply to the assignment. We advise looking over this Perusall scoring guide that contains recommendations on how to set up the analytics and also explains how the scoring system works.
- After your assignment is set up in Perusall, instructors will want to get that assignment to show in Canvas. How they accomplish linking it back to Canvas is dependent on what option they have selected for “LMS gradebook column management” in the setup wizard.
- If they have selected “Automatic gradebook column creation,” a new gradebook column will appear, and the assignment will auto populate in Canvas. Please be sure to check that this has occurred and no duplicate gradebook columns exist.
- If Instructors have chosen “Instructors will create Deep links...,” instructors will create a Canvas assignment with a similar name to the Perusall assignment, and link to the Perusall assignment manually by going to “Submission type: external tool” and selecting the Perusall assignment of choice in the settings of the Canvas assignment.
Peer Review
Perusall now allows for peer review that is as robust or as simple as the instructor would like. Please see Perusall’s Guide to Review-Based Assignments for a full explanation of how this feature works.
We recommend not adding a due date to the Canvas Assignment but instead providing availability dates and letting students know to follow the dates provided inside Perusall for the best experience. The day the assignment opens, instructors could also post a Canvas Announcement to inform students of the assignment and to look inside Perusall for specific due dates. Students will receive reminder notifications from Perusall if the instructor decides to turn the “remind students” feature on when building the Peer Review assignment.
Grading, Reviewing Comments, and Reports
All grades for all Perusall assignments will be viewable on the left-hand side of Perusall navigation under the title Gradebook. Depending on the settings, these grades may automatically be released to students after the due date or depend on a manual review from the instructor before being released.
Perusall allows instructors to view all comments in the document and highlights areas with many questions or comments as possible confusion areas that need clarification by the instructor, and allows instructors to see all comments in a spreadsheet-like format.
We recommend Perusall’s guide on reviewing student work to learn more about the review process and how to get the most out of viewing students' comments.
Additional Resources and Support
For additional Perusall Support, please contact Perusall through their Submit a Request page or email online-learning-help@sas.upenn.edu.
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