Perusall

Perusall is an extra platform for online learning that the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam has licensed to support online teaching and learning. Though it is not technically linked to Canvas it can be regarded as one of the teaching tools of Canvas.

Perusall enables you to annotate learning materials: providing thoughtful comments to learning materials. Research (1) shows that by annotating thoughtfully, you’ll learn more and get better grades; so here’s what “annotating thoughtfully” means: Effective annotations deeply engage points in the readings, stimulate discussion, offer informative questions or comments, and help others by addressing their questions or confusions.

Study together (formative use)

Your teacher can assign you to a groups of students that can study online learning materials together. You can make and respond to comments that help you and your fellow students to study the materials closely and to deepen your understanding. For example by asking clarifications, asking examples, explaining concepts more fundamentally etc. This assignment can be a free additional learning opportunity for a course.

Gain credit (summative use)

Your teacher can assign you to a groups of students that can study online sources together, but also assign you to make a minimum number of comments. The teacher can decide to assess the quality of the comments, the timeliness of the commenting and your time reading (opening) the reading materials. These characteristics have shown to be predictive of study succes (1).

The teacher can decide to incorporate parts of your studying achievement into your final grade by assigning some credit. This is comparable to assigning credit in for example regular group work.

Automated scoring

You may notice that Perusall is able to calculate an effort score for you automatically. The score can be (at the discretion of the choice of your teacher) be composed of various weights regarding the quality, timeliness, quantity, and distribution of the annotations. Read about how annotations are used in a calculation here. In practice, it is not that hard to gain a sufficient level of effort achievement for credit gaining purposes.

You may also notice that the quality of your comments is scored in an automated way. For that purpose, Perusall and Harvard University (Eng language) and the University of Groningen (Dutch language) have trained and calibrated the system by having hand-scored a 1000 comments. Providing high quality comments is not perse difficult. Read the example on scoring below.