Center for Faculty Excellence

Faculty High-Five: Perusall

Transform Your Teaching with Perusall

Perusall is a social annotation tool for reading assignments that integrates with Pilot seamlessly. It allows students and faculty to collaboratively markup.pdf documents or digital textbooks. Instead of reading a document and discussing it, Perusall brings the discussion to the text.

If you are available on December 10 at 2 p.m., please join Eric Mazur, co-founder of Perusall, as he demonstrates how to move information transfer and sense-making online and make it interactive, promoting social interactions between students. In addition, he will discuss how Perusall promotes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to improve student performance. Click this link to register for the workshop on Thursday, December 10 at 2 p.m...

Wright State Perusall Testimonials

Hear firsthand from Wright State faculty who have successfully employed Perusall in their transition to remote teaching.

Using Perusall in the Remote Classroom

Ashley Hall, Associate Professor of English

"Most of the courses that I teach are face to face, and so obviously, like everyone else with the pandemic, [I] pivoted to mostly remote, synchronous. One thing that I find in this remote format is that everything takes a lot longer… [and] I hadn't yet figured out how to accomplish [certain activities remotely]. And that's where I think Perusall really filled a need for me. For example, looking at and talking through a text together, whether it be something that we were analyzing or even something that was just an informative document, like the syllabus. It wasn't about trying out this new software. It was ‘here's this thing that I do with my students and I need to be able to do it in this remote format... and will this thing help me do that?’ And it did. It saves me time, I can't say that it'll save everyone time, but for me, it works well in that way."

Adrienne Traxler, Associate Professor of Physics

"I knew that one of the things that was going to be tough this semester was the lack of interaction with other students, and I wanted to find ways to incorporate that that would not necessarily rely on people having good video cameras, good Internet connections. I think a lot of students are self-conscious about turning on their cameras [and] talking… but interacting through text, they all know how to do that. I think [with Perusall] it's easier for them to have this kind of conversational interaction there than… if I'm in class and I say, ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ You know, sometimes somebody will speak up, but [it can be] intimidating to do that. I do also hear from students things like, ’It's nice to have other people explaining something to me in the text that I didn't get.’ They'll be annotating with the same people throughout the semester and they do get familiar with people. [I’ll see] friendly connections form between students. I think anything that humanizes us all for each other is especially useful right now."

Leonard Kenyon, Lecturer of Biological Sciences

"I used Perusall this semester for my Principles of Teaching Biology course for TAs. The social aspect of science is so important and too often not taught while teaching. It was incredible to see the discussions emerge from the papers the Ss had to read using Perusall prior to class. They reflected on their own experiences of science being told to them rather than doing science to learn. Now more than ever, the social component that Perusall offers is needed in both the synchronous and asynchronous online environment."

Perusall Support Resources

For technical support and guidance, please visit the CTL Perusall Tutorials page for videos that walk through the process of setting Perusall up in Pilot.