For Professors: How to Use Perusall

1. Setting Up Perusall in your Course through Course Site

Perusall should always be set up directly through Course Site to avoid any potential student account problems. Add Perusall by choosing "External Tool" as a new activity in your course.  

Name the activity "Create Perusall Account" or something similar. Then Choose Perusall under the "preconfigured tool" dropdown. Click Save.

Then click the link you created in order for the course to be provisioned in Perusall. You should always use this link when accessing Perusall. Students should use this link to automatically create their Perusall accounts in the course.

2. Adding a Resource in Perusall

  • In your Perusall dashboard, click the Library tab.

  • Click the Add button and select the type of resource you want to add.
  • If you are using a digital textbook, you can browse, search, or request a textbook by title.
    * Once the textbook has been added to the course (you will receive a notification when this has been done), you can begin assigning chapters.

  • You also have the option of adding assignable text from local files, Dropbox, video sources, or from another Perusall course.


3. Creating Reading Assignments in Perusall

  1. Select the desired resource in your Library tab.
  2. Click the Assign button for that resource and you’ll be able to set up the assignment as well as the due dates and advanced options for the assignment.

4. Instructions for adding a Perusall assignment to a course in Course Site

  1. Go to your course in Course Site
  2. Click the Turn Editing On button in the top right.
  3. Under your desired section/topic, click Add an activity or resource.

Select "External Tool" from the list



  1. Give the assignment a name (the assignment name should always match the EXACT assignment name given in Perusall.)
  2. Click "Show more..." and under "Launch Container", select New Window. The other options can all be set at your discretion. 
    • If you do NOT want grades to be passed from Perusall into your Course Site gradebook, be sure to uncheck the box for "Accept grades from the tool" under the Privacy section.
  3. Choose Perusall under "preconfigured tool" dropdown
  4. Choose the Perusall reading that you want to link to from the "Select Content" button, and then click the blue "Link to this assignment" button
  5. Click Save and return to course.

Copying Assignments from one Persuall Course to Another Persuall Course

Once your requested courses for the semester have been set up in course site, 

  1. Connect or "provision" multiple course site sections for Perusall by adding an initial Perusal assignment to each. 
  2. Set-up your assignments in your master course in Perusall.
  3. In Perusall, navigate to the course where you to copy these assignments.
  4. Go to Course Setup > Readings > Documents > Add > Materials from another course.


4. Select the appropriate master course.

PLEASE NOTE: You must now re-add the Perusall Assignment Links to your recipient course in order to establish direct links to each assignment and add them to your Course Site gradebook from Perusall.

Notes:

  • Persuall links will need to be re-created for each of your courses initially and cannot be imported from a previous version of your course.
  • If you would like to give access to additional instructors, you can do so via Settings > Instructor Access in Perusall.
  • Students should be directed to ONLY access Perusall via Course Site - accounts are auto provisioned for that course (using their Lehigh email address) the first time they click the Perusall link within a course.
  • Students will be prompted to purchase the textbook (if you have provisioned one) through Perusall when they first access a reading assignment in the platform.
  • Perusall will automatically grade your students annotations and post scores when all due dates have past.  Here is how scoring Works: https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/sections/360005183594-Scoring-and-grades
  • If using PDF's a source file, they should be OCR ready in order to take advantage of the full functionality of Perusall.

New Features:

Add a Quiz to Perusal Assignment: https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/articles/7330355720471-How-do-Quizzes-work-

15 Dollar Charge to Students?

Perusall has changed the default setting for free materials to a suggested fee of $15.00, you can change the fee to zero dollars.

https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/articles/21928191805335-What-is-the-cost-of-using-Perusall-if-I-am-using-only-free-materials 

Additional Resources:

Perusall Help Website:https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us 

Perusall Knowledge Base for Instructors: https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002157414-Instructors

Perusall Knowledge Base for Students: https://support.perusall.com/hc/en-us/categories/360002173133-Students

Contact: support@perusall.com










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