July 28, 2022
- Instructors can now opt to ignore deadlines when computing assignment scores through the checkbox under Settings > Advanced, to support courses with a mastery grading structure where students can complete work for full credit anytime up until the end of the course.
- Assignment instructions are now shown to students more prominently in a new panel on the right inside an assignment. The new panel makes it easier to read long assignment instructions and also displays the deadline and the student's progress.
July 19, 2022
- Instructors can now opt for quizzes to show students immediate feedback on their quiz responses as they respond to each question (rather than waiting until after the assignment deadline has passed to show students the correct answers).
July 11, 2022
- Rich text editors within the application (e.g., comment composition, editing assignment instructions, etc.) now have a new button to remove all formatting from selected text. Use this to clean up formatted text that is pasted in from Word or other applications.
July 7, 2022
- Assignments can now be worth different numbers of points: instructors can override the number of points for an assignment by enabling custom scoring settings for that assignment.
- Quizzes will now display the correct answer to students after the assignment deadline has passed (and they can no longer change their responses), and can now optionally also display an answer explanation for each question.
- Downloads of all comments in a course now include additional fields (whether the comment was starred by the user downloading the comments, and what comment was being responded to, if any).
- Instructors can now quickly edit an assignment or add extended deadlines right from the gradebook, using shortcut icons at the top of each assignment column.
June 30, 2022
- Analytics reports now indicate the number of responses posted (in addition to the total number of comments posted).
June 29, 2022
- Instructors can now add quizzes to their course. Assign a quiz alongside other readings, videos, podcasts, or other materials to gauge student understanding.
- Scoring is now simpler to set up, and several presets are available to quickly choose scoring settings based on what the instructor would like to focus on.
- Instructors can now easily adjust the way Perusall's analytics are used (or not) in a course. Courses can be set to use automatic grading with analytics (the default), manual grading with analytics, analytics only but no grading, and neither grading nor analytics.
- A new "Grade assignment" dialog is available to quickly review all student work in one place: engagement analytics, comments posted, and quiz responses. If automated grading is enabled, instructors can see a clear breakdown of how the score was calculated. Either way, instructors can manually assign or override grades as well.
- By clicking the "puzzle piece" icon beneath a comment, instructors indicate that students will not be able to see responses to that comment until they post their own response.
- Instructors can now optionally name groups (rather than Group 1, Group 2, etc).
- Instructors in courses utilizing the LTI 1.3 (LTI Advantage) integration with Canvas, Blackboard, or Brightspace/D2L can import groups and group names from any group set in their LMS.
- Instructors utilizing manual group sync can now sync all assignments at once.
- Additional voices are now available for the document Read Aloud feature.
- There is a new grade release option to release grades automatically once the initial deadline has passed, but before any late period / post-deadline reply window. Use this to give students score feedback but with additional opportunity to increase their score.
- When setting assignment deadlines, an "End of day" shortcut will set the time to be 11:59 PM.
- Student analytics reports now have an "Average" row at the bottom with summary statistics.
June 10, 2022
- Instructors can now upload caption files (in VTT format) for videos that are hosted on Dropbox, Google Drive, or Sharepoint/OneDrive.
June 6, 2022
- "YouTube Shorts" videos can now be added to a course.
May 31, 2022
- Perusall now supports LTI 1.3 (LTI Advantage) for deeper integration with LMSs, including automatic full roster sync (so instructors can set up groups before the semester starts) and grade passback without the need for assignment-specific links from your LMS. LTI 1.1 will continue to be supported, so LMS administrators can plan an upgrade between semesters to avoid any disruption to ongoing courses.
May 12, 2022
- When clicking on a link that would take them out of an assignment (e.g., a link to an unassigned chapter in the book), the student will be asked if they want to leave the assignment.
April 18, 2022
- When a user enables the Open Dyslexic font (designed for easier reading for people with dyslexia), the Open Dyslexic font is now applied to the entire user interface, not just book content (except for PDF-based document content, whose fonts cannot be changed by Perusall).
March 29, 2022
- A new integration with the Copyright Clearance Center allows instructors to clear digital rights for uploaded materials (e.g., articles, book chapters) when needed. Students pay a small fee to access cleared materials. To start the process, click the Clear digital rights button on most types of uploaded documents in your course library, or select Library > Add content > Document from my device and clear digital rights to upload new material from your computer. This is an additional service for instructors that want it; instructors using material that they already have the right or permission to use can still upload that material directly to Perusall and students will not pay for access.
- Instructors can now "unrelease" grades that were previously released to students in the Gradebook.
March 3, 2022
- When a student opens a document from the Library, and the document has one or more assignments associated with it, the student will be asked if they want to open an assignment or open the whole document instead.
- For some PDFs, Perusall can now automatically detect the title (and possibly authors and publication year) from the PDF. When possible, the name of the document in the Library will automatically use this title as the document name, rather than the PDF file name.
- Instructors can now disable flagging functionality if they do not want students to have the ability to flag comments as inappropriate (Settings > Advanced > Do not allow students to flag comments as inappropriate).
January 24, 2022
- Any downloadable PDF can now also be downloaded with the comment threads embedded as annotations inside the PDF file. (Note: Due to a change in how comments are stored internally, comment threads started prior to January 18, 2022 will appear in the left margin of the downloaded PDF rather than directly over the highlighted text or figure.)
- Assignments can now be assigned on a per-group rather than per-student basis. To do this, your course must be set to use manual groups (one set of groups across all documents).
- The web page snapshot tool for adding web pages to the course library has been improved to more reliably capture the layout and text of complex pages.
- Instructors can now search the course roster instantly via a new search box at the top of the Library tab.
January 6, 2022
- You can now search the course content library instantly via a new search box at the top of the Library tab.
December 31, 2021
- You can now remove a one-on-one conversation from the left course navigation panel by hovering over the conversation and clicking X.
- Instructors can now upload documents to a course directly from mobile devices that support file storage via Add content > Documents from my device.
December 8, 2021
- Instructors are now informed in the notification email which student flagged a comment.
- Instructors can see the deadline for each assignment underneath the corresponding column in the Gradebook.
November 30, 2021
- In the gradebook, when viewing the scoring breakdown for a student (click on the score to view), instructors can now click Review comments to quickly see at all comments for the student on that assignment.
November 23, 2021
- A new scoring settings page contains a colorful graphical display to show how the various components are weighted and how the instructor's settings can allow multiple avenues for students to earn full credit.
- You can now filter the comments you see in a particular document to only show highlights corresponding to a particular instructor.
- Instructors can now sort the gradebook by first or last names separately.
November 16, 2021
- You can now have the text of a comment read aloud, in addition to Perusall's normal read-aloud functionality that reads the assigned text aloud.
- Instructors can now prevent students from flagging a particular post as inappropriate. (To do this, select Show comment scores from the main filter dropdown menu in a document, and then click the score dropdown underneath any comment.)
- You can now create text highlights by using the browser's caret mode, which provides more flexibility and accessibility for users that use a keyboard.
October 26, 2021
- Students can now see which other students are in their discussion group for a particular document by clicking a new Members of my group button in the right toolbar.
September 10, 2021
- You can now customize the color of your avatar by clicking your name/avatar in the upper right corner of the page and selecting Edit profile.
August 9, 2021
- Instructors can now leave a course without deleting it, under Settings > Access.
July 20, 2021
- When uploading a PDF, Perusall will now attempt to automatically rotate pages as needed so that all pages are upright (if you enable this in your course under Settings > Advanced), and will apply OCR (optical character recognition) where possible so that PDFs scanned from paper documents have machine-readable text. This will improve accessibility, enable Perusall's read-aloud feature, and enable selection of text for creating comments.
- A new emoji picker is now available when composing comments, including emoji with user-selectable skin tones.
- You can now search the list of comments shown in the All conversations tab within a document, video, or podcast.
- As a shortcut, you can now double-click a document or assignment to open it from the Library or Assignments tab, respectively.
- You can now download poll results as a spreadsheet.
July 7, 2021
- You can now add a poll to a comment. To do this, click the new
button in the toolbar of the comment editor and enter the choices the respondents should select from. Any student (or instructor) that is viewing the comment will be able to respond to the poll and see the aggregated results. - Instructors can now import PowerPoint files directly to the Library.
- You can now optionally add your gender pronouns to your Perusall account, to appear anywhere your name is shown. To do this, click your name in the upper-right corner and select Edit profile.
- If your account is connected to your institution's LMS and your name in the LMS is different from the name that you would like to be displayed in Perusall, you can optionally specify that a different name be shown in Perusall using Edit profile.
June 28, 2021
- After requesting a book from the Perusall catalog, a new Pending book requests tab in the Library lets the instructor track the status of book requests that are in progress, and cancel any unwanted requests.
- Images can now be uploaded to the Library in JPEG, GIF, or PNG format as a new document type, for analyzing art, musical scores, or other image-based content.
- Students will now see their cumulative average assignment score in My Scores.
- There is a new grade sync option for LMS-connected courses in Settings > General; you can now optionally create a single link in your LMS and sync students' average Perusall assignment scores back to your LMS rather than creating individual assignment links in your LMS and syncing back each score separately.
- Students' group numbers are now shown in the Gradebook.
- Instructors can now download students' activity data across the entire semester under the Students tab on the course home page.
- Instructors can now automatically reshuffle groups to match current choices when changing the automatic grouping parameters (e.g., group size) for a course.
June 1, 2021
- Instructors can now extend a student's deadlines for all assignments all at once, when a student joins the course late or otherwise needs to be given permission to catch up. Navigate to the Students tab and select Extend deadlines for a particular student.
May 26, 2021
- The "All comments" dialog now shows the group number associated with each comment.
May 25, 2021
- A new "What's new" link in the navigation bar will take you to this page, and will be flagged with a red dot whenever new features are available that you haven't read about yet.
May 19, 2021
- Instructors can now use @everyone in a comment to notifying everyone in the course that the thread is visible to (i.e., all instructors, as well as students in the same group as the originator of the thread).
- You can now use @conversation to notify everyone who has participated in a thread (by posting or upvoting).
- Assignment averages now appear in the bottom row of the Gradebook.
- Instructors can now set a new option in Settings > Advanced to incorporate score on in-progress into students' average scores in the Gradebook.
May 17, 2021
- You can now start a one-on-one chat with another student or instructor who is currently online by clicking their avatar (photo or initials) in the upper left corner of a document.
April 27, 2021
- Instructors can now search for podcasts to add to a course from the Podcast Index directory, by title or description.
April 22, 2021
- Instructors can now create multimodal assignments that will open and will be scored as a single assignment, even including content of different types (e.g., a book chapter and a video).
- Instructors can now create student upload folders where students can upload content to directly.
- Instructors can now add descriptions to folders that will appear for students.
- Old assignments can now be hidden on the course home page, so that upcoming assignments are more visible.
April 1, 2021
- The filter dropdown at the top of a document or video now has an additional option to show only comments where you were @mentioned.
- Instructors can now optionally hide grade calculation details through a new setting in Settings > Advanced.
March 25, 2021
- While watching a video or listening to a podcast, Perusall will now suggest unseen conversations to you by showing you the first comment in the thread as you pass the corresponding place in the video/audio timeline.
- Numbers can now be used in hashtags.
March 17, 2021
- You can now highlight a word in any document and click the information icon in the toolbar to look it up in the dictionary.
- Instructors can now download a list of which students have been assigned to each group for a document.
- Instructors can now set relative quality point values to all be the same to ignore annotation quality for scoring purposes.
March 1, 2021
- Instructors can now disable "nudges" in their courses through a new setting in Settings > Advanced.
February 9, 2021
- Perusall now prevents files with the same name from being uploaded to the same course, to avoid inadvertent duplicates of documents in a course.
- Instructors can now download all comments across the entire course.
- Instructors can now duplicate an assignment using a new Duplicate button on the assignment details panel.
February 4, 2021
- The filter dropdown at the top of a document or video now has an additional option to show only comments posted by other course members.
January 8, 2021
- Instructors can now drag and drop assignments within a deadline group to rearrange them, so that assignments can appear in any order.
- Manual groups can now be imported from a spreadsheet, to save time when defining manual groups for large courses.
- Instructors can now "fine-tune" automatically-assigned groups by dragging and dropping students between groups in the Library > Groups dialog.
- Assignment reminders and scoring parameters can now be specified on a per-assignment basis.
- Typing in a URL to a comment box now automatically makes it a link.
- Instructors that wish to completely disable Perusall's scoring and remove the Gradebook can do so through a new "never" option under Settings > General > Release scores.