How can I add comments or questions directed to students?

Instructors have several ways to direct questions or comments to students. To help you stay organized, Perusall uses color-coded highlights to distinguish comment types:

• Blue Highlights: Indicate instructor comments. You can reply directly to student threads, and your responses will appear alongside theirs

• Yellow Highlights: Indicate student comments.

• Green Highlights: Indicate checkpoints (required stops tied to a prompt or quiz).

Students will see your blue and green highlights as points of guidance or requirements, while their own contributions and those of their peers will appear in yellow.

What are checkpoints?

Checkpoints help guide students to focus on key areas in video and text-based content within your Perusall course. By placing these interactive markers directly in the material, you can ensure students engage deeply with the content. Think of checkpoints as “required stops” encouraging deeper engagement. They turn open-ended engagement into a structured experience, with specific instructor-led prompts or quiz questions to receive full credit.

How to add a checkpoint

1. Highlight a section of text or a timestamp of a specific moment in your media.
2. A comment box will appear in the right side conversation panel. Select Add checkpoint (Beta).
3. Choose your checkpoint type. 

Perusall offers two primary types of checkpoints:

1. Prompt checkpoints

   • Prompt checkpoints require students to respond to a comment. You can also use generative AI to suggest discussion prompts based on the text you've highlighted, (AI-suggested prompts and quizzes are not available for YouTube or Vimeo videos,(Only user-uploaded captions can be sent to the AI model.).
     

   Pro tip
   
   Enable "Hide replies from students until they post their response." to encourage independent thinking and ensure students aren't just "parroting" the first person to reply. -- Also available for non-checkpoint comments.

2. Quiz checkpoints 

   • Quiz checkpoints require students to answer one or more quiz questions. Students must answer these questions to progress and receive credit.

   • To add a Quiz checkpoint in an assignment, follow these steps:

     • Highlight where you would like to place your quiz checkpoint.
     • Select Add checkpoint (beta), and chooseQuizcheckpoint.
     • Select or create a quiz via the following options:
       • Select an existing quiz from your Library using the dropdown menu.
       • Manually create a new quiz.
       • Use AI to generate a quiz based on highlighted content and course learning objectives.
     • Select the question(s) you would like to add as quiz checkpoints.

• Within the All conversations panel on the right, checkpoints appear with green icons.

  

   

• Students see a checklist of requirements separated by task, i.e. required comments, prompt and quiz checkpoints.

  

   

Using generative AI to generate discussion prompts

Instructors can use generative AI to get suggested discussion prompts and quizzes. Perusall won’t post automatically; rather it only suggests questions for you to review, edit, or discard before sharing with students. 

By default, all AI-generated checkpoints use the course and assignment learning objectives, whether in a text-based document or video. In addition, for text-based documents, the content before, within, and after a highlight informs AI-generated material. To encourage tailored AI suggestions at a specific timestamp in a video, we recommend uploading captions. Otherwise, video suggestions will be based solely on course and assignment learning objectives. 

Users cannot upload closed captioning files for videos linked from YouTube and Vimeo. Click here to learn about caption upload options.

To generate a discussion prompt: 

1. Highlight the specific material. 
2. A comment box will appear in the right side conversation panel. Select Add checkpoint (Beta). 
3. Click Create with AI (the robot icon underneath the comment box), and select Create checkpoint. 

To remove this feature from your course, go to Settings > Advanced > Commenting and enable Hide instructor option to use AI to generate suggested discussion prompts. 

Perusall does not use your data to train AI models. Learn more about how Perusall uses AI.

Scoring and credit

Checkpoints add additional requirements to your existing components within your scoring templates:

• Each Prompt checkpoint increases the total number of comments required for your Comment content score.

• Quiz checkpoints count toward a student’s Quizzes score.

Where to see checkpoint progress

In the grade assignment window, you can view a student's Engagement metrics to see exactly how many checkpoints they have completed (e.g., "Prompt checkpoints: 1 of 1 completed"). This provides a clear diagnostic of whether a student is meeting the structured goals of the assignment.


 

Practical scoring applications

• Use this configuration if you want a controlled experience where students only respond to your specific prompts rather than creating their own threads.

  1. Navigate to your Scoring Template.
  2. Set the Number of required comments to 0.
  3. Keep a percentage allocated to Comment content.

  In this scenario, the system recognizes that the required response count has been met via the Checkpoints, allowing students to earn their "Comment content" score based on the quality of their responses to your prompts.

  If you are using a mixture of prompts and quiz questions as your Checkpoints, make sure to also give credit to quizzes in your Perusall Scoring template. 
   

• Use this configuration to require both structured instructor-led responses and original student-to-student engagement (replies and original comments).
  • Comment requirements: If your template requires a specific number of comments, students must post that many original highlights or peer replies to earn full credit.

  • Checkpoint requirements: Any added Checkpoints act as additional requirements. Students must complete these on top of their required comment count to receive a full score.

    Pro tip 
    
    If requiring both, explicitly tell your students that Checkpoints and original comments are separate components of their overall Comment content score to avoid confusion.