How do I set up a new course with Perusall?

Click Perusall in your Left-Hand Nav in Canvas

To pair a new course with Perusall you must click Perusall in the the left hand nav.

If you don't see Perusall you may need to add it to your course.

See: Perusall Social Learning Platform

Choose to start with an empty course or copy an existing course

If you are looking to Copy course material from an existing course follow this guide from Perusall: How to Copy and reuse courses on Perusall

Select Start with empty course

Click continue in the bottom right corner of the screen

Choose if you would like to set up a Syllabus Assignment

Adding a syllabus assignment is a low stakes way to introduce your students to the Perusall tool and as an added benefit typically gets the students to read the syllabus. You can choose to upload your own Syllabus or select a getting started assignment that takes students about 15-30 minutes to complete as it walks the students through all the important buttons they will need to know when using the platform.

Click continue in the bottom right corner of the screen

Step 3: Select Content

In Perusall you have the ability to choose your course text. Your students would need to pay for this text. This can be an ideal solution if you would like the book to be fully digital and were going to have students purchase a book anyway. Speak with the book store and the library before deciding if you will only have students access the book via Perusall.

Click continue in the bottom right corner of the screen

Step 4: Student Cost

Tufts has an enterprise license, therefore there are no costs to the students, unless you require the students to purchase or rent a book through the Perusall Catalogue for the course.

Click continue in the bottom right corner of the screen

Enter your course settings

  1. Department: This is just for Perusall's data. You can put whatever you feels most closely represents your course. Ex: all dental courses would be entered as 'Dentistry'
  2. Start and End date of the course: These dates control when students are able to enroll in the course. If enrolled before the end date, students maintain access to all course content.
  3. Scoring and Analytics: You can choose to use automatic scoring and engagement analytics. You can also choose to turn them off.  SEE: Setting up and controlling course analytics for more information
  4. Release scores to students: If you have any automatic grading enabled you MUST have this setting set to 'Only after instructor manually releases them in the Gradebook' - This ensures that faculty members must look at the grades before relying on AI grading.

When Perusall says 'Gradebook' they are referring to the gradebook WITHIN Perusall. You must manually release the grades in the Perusall Gradebook before they automatically sync to the Canvas Gradebook. You Canvas gradebook 'rules" still apply. The grades are only released in Canvas if you have allowed them to be released.

NOTE: Students can go find their grades in the Perusall gradebook, even if you haven't released the assignment grades to the students in Canvas.

  1. Grade sync to LMS: After you have manually released the grades in the Perusall Gradebook you can allow those grades to automatically be sent to Canvas. You have the choice between individual assignment grades or 1 singular average score for all Perusall assignments.
  2. LMS gradebook column manangement: With the new 1.3LTI connection, you do not need to create assignments in Canvas. Once you create the assignment in Perusall, it will automatically generate an assignment in Canvas that you can add to a module. You can choose if this will also generate a gradebook column in the Canvas course as well.
  3. Enrollment estimate: Add the approximate number of students who will enroll in the course.
  4. Target group size: Tufts recommends annotation groups of approximately 8-12 students, depending on your course size. Perusall will create groups around this target size. However, Perusall will not create 6 groups of 8 students and 1 group with 2 students. Perusall will keeps the groups all as close to the target group size as possible.

Click continue in the bottom right corner of the screen

Check out Perusalls Tips for encouraging student use

Click Continue to Library to begin creating assignments in Perusall

After your course has successfully be created and linked to your Canvas course you can begin creating assignments.

Here are some helpful links to get you started:

Need help getting Perusall set up in your course? Email [email protected] for a consultation.