Blackboard setup

Initial Setup

To connect Perusall to Blackboard, first ask your Blackboard Administrator to request a key and secret from Perusall Support and to set up Perusall as an LTI Tool Provider for your institution's instance of Blackboard (administrators: enter app.perusall.com as the Provider Domain). Ensure that your Blackboard Administrator has enabled the LTI tool option for your course in Course Tools.

Now, create a Web Link to Perusall. Enter Perusall for the Name and use https://app.perusall.com/lti/launch as the URL. Make sure "This is a Tool Provider" is selected. Now return to your course and click on this link to launch Perusall and create a new course in Perusall that maps to your course in Blackboard. Once you have done this, students can also click this link to launch into your Perusall course from Blackboard.

Setting up assignments

To enable grade sync, create a Web Link for each assignment in Perusall. For each reading assignment you create in Perusall, create a corresponding Web Link in Blackboard. These assignment-specific Web Links should have the same URL (https://app.perusall.com/lti/launch) and "This is a Tool Provider" and "Enable Evaluation" should both be checked.

To link each assignment in Blackboard to the proper assignment in Perusall, make sure that the name of the Web Link in Blackboard exactly matches the name of the assignment in Perusall. To retrieve the name of an assignment in Perusall (Perusall assigns names automatically when you have not explicitly given an assignment a name), select it in the right Assignments panel in Perusall, and then click the "Copy title for LMS" button on the toolbar. The assignment name will be copied to the clipboard, and you can paste it into the Web Link name field in Blackboard.

To test that the assignment linkage works, launch the assignment in Blackboard and ensure that you are taken to the correct assignment in Perusall -- you should bypass the course home page in Perusall when clicking on a Perusall assignment from Blackboard.

Troubleshooting

If you use a Learning Module, Blackboard will attempt to open Perusall within an iframe. However, as a security measure, Perusall prevents itself from being "framed" within another app, and if you try to launch Perusall from a Learning Module you will get a message indicating that the browser couldn't launch Perusall. To fix this, we suggest avoiding the use of Learning Modules; instead, use folders to organize your Perusall links in the Blackboard course.

On July 28, 2017, Blackboard issued an advisory that some LTI tools may not work correctly in Safari. If your institution uses an older version of Blackboard (prior to the Q2 2018 release), we suggest avoiding use of Safari when accessing Perusall through Blackboard.

See our general LMS troubleshooting page for common issues.