Many of you may have taken the RSI course where Alisa Cooper demonstrates some of the tools we have access to that allow us regular and substantive interaction with our online students. Perusall is one of those tools where you can assign students a reading (or some other course content), and then they annotate and discuss it with other classmates and with you, the instructor.

Here you can see the start of the reading with student highlighting. On the right are student discussions I can click on to expand and read/comment.

Lately I have been exploring some helpful data that Perusall can give me on each reading/discussion. One item they can provide is a “confusion report.” The confusion report summarizes a few key areas where students are having more questions. The report includes the summary of the area and then includes a few student discussions under the summary. I have taken this information to form a class announcement to address the items students are having the most confusion about. I can include the summarized material and use student names as I wish. I can certainly qualify this communication with students as RSI since discussions are regular, and we are discussing course content.

Here you can see the general issues coming up where students have more questions. Under that, you can see some student discussions related to those ideas.

Another feature they have is the “analytics.” Using analytics, you can run a few different reports: grade distribution, comment submission heat map, page view report, and student activity report. The one I find most useful is the student activity report which shows me a few things:

  • The amount of time a student has spent viewing the document vs. the amount of time the student has spent engaging (scrolling, writing comments) with the document.
  • The total number of comments each student made, including discussions started and discussions participated in.
  • The number of up-votes (students can up-vote comments they like) each student receieved.
  • The total word count for each student and the average word count per comment per student.

I can use this information to communicate with students individually about how they can improve their performance, and I can use it to enter grades into Canvas.

A final feature I use is the “all comments.” Using this, I can print out a report with all of the student comments in the discussion, sorting them in multiple ways including highest to lowest quality, the date/time the discussion was created, or how many upvotes the discussion received. What I tend to do is read through the comments, noting some general categories that come up, some high points in the discussion, and questions, and then I can take that information and craft an announcement for students.

Overall, I appreciate the features in Perusall, and I’m making use of them the best I can. What features are you using? Am I missing anything? Comment below.

Shared by: