You can add comments or questions to the document in the same manner as students. Any conversation that you start will be highlighted in blue to distinguish it from student comments (which appear in yellow), so students can easily find your comments if you want to pose your own questions or create comments to guide students.

You can also respond to student questions and comments, and your response will appear alongside student responses. (Some instructors prefer to avoid jumping into student conversations, as they find that the presence of an instructor in a conversation can sometimes prevent it from flourishing in the same way it might if students were discussing only amongst themselves. Of course, this may not apply to the particular students that you work with!)

Staged Threads

Instructors can create comments that require students to reply to a post before they can see other responses.  To do this, click the puzzle piece icon below your comment to create a Staged Thread.

Using Staged Threads in your course:

• Helps encourage students to think independently before seeing and responding to others' thoughts.
• You can create a thread by clicking the puzzle piece below any comment posted by an instructor (except for comments posted in reply to another comment).
• Once a thread is marked as staged, students will only see the instructor prompt until they respond.
• Once they respond they'll see all other replies by students in their group, and can continue the discussion with their classmates as normal.

Using generative AI to generate discussion prompts

Instructors can use generative AI to suggest discussion prompts that you can pose for students to respond to. Perusall will never post anything automatically; rather, it will suggest a question that you can review, edit, or discard prior to it being posted for students to see.

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

To generate a discussion prompt, highlight some text that you want students to discuss. (To give the AI model adequate context, highlight at least a full sentence or two.) In the conversation panel on the right, underneath the comment box, click Suggest a discussion prompt. 

The AI model runs completely within Perusall's secure, private infrastructure.