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.

Before selecting content to use in Perusall, consider copyright law and/or whether this use is allowed by a license. Favor materials in the public domain or that carry a license open to this type of use, such as a Creative Commons license. Additionally, it is possible to link to some content such as webpages and other publicly viewable videos and podcasts.

Many licenses for library-subscribed resources may not allow downloading of content into Canvas for use in Perusall or other similar collaborative annotation tools. Seek permission from the publisher before adding their content. Perusall maintains a catalog of titles from which you can select textbooks to use within Perusall for a fee, which may be appropriate in situations where students would be purchasing the textbooks anyway.

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.

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.

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 management: 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.