A student’s guide to navigating Perusall

Enrolling in your course

There are two ways to enroll in your course. This depends on how your teacher initially set up the course.

1. If your instructor has integrated Perusall with your school's Learning Management System (e.g., Blackboard, Canvas, Desire2Learn, Moodle, etc.), launch the appropriate Perusall links within the learning management system. There is no course code. 
2. If your instructor created a standalone course (not integrated in the learning management system), go to perusall.com and click Login. Create an account and the onboarding process will prompt you for a course code. This will be provided to you by your instructor.

Purchasing your Perusall material

If your course uses a book from the Perusall catalog or requires a platform access fee, you will be prompted to purchase upon the first entry into the class or the first time you access the book. You can purchase access via: 

• Using a credit card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or get access instantly but pay later with Affirm or Klarna. (Depending on your region, you may have additional region-specific purchase options available).
• Purchasing a Perusall access code from your school's bookstore. Once purchased, your store will give you a code of the form PERUSALL-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX. (This option is available if your instructor has set up the ability for students to purchase the code from the school bookstore.)

To view your purchases, navigate to your account home page and select My purchases.

Some titles may give the instructor the ability to set a 2-week free trial. Once that trial is over, students will then be prompted to purchase.  You can always purchase the book before the 14 days are up by navigating to the Library and clicking on the book.  Learn more about our refund policy.

Starting an assignment

Once you log in, you will be directed to the course homepage.

• The library tab is where all documents for the course are held.

• The assignment tab shows you a list of all the assignments and deadlines that your instructor has assigned for the course.

• To access the reading assignment, click on the link for that assignment.

How to highlight, create comments, and join conversations

• When you open a document, you'll see highlights superimposed on the document that represent comments that you and other students have entered.
• Yellow highlights indicate comments or questions by you or other students; blue highlights indicate comments from your instructor.
• To start a conversation, highlight some text; once you finish highlighting, you will see a panel open on the right where you can type your comment. Press Enter or Return to submit the comment; your classmates will see it appear in real time. (If you are having trouble highlighting text, see this page.)
• When someone responds to your question or comment, you will receive a notification by email and you can post a reply by either signing on or merely replying to the email.
• To add to a conversation started by one of your classmates, simply click on the highlight in the text to open up the conversation panel, type your comment, and then press Enter.
• You can also highlight part of a figure rather than text by using the toolbar buttons at the top. When you have elected to highlight a figure, click and drag to draw a box around the area of interest, or simply click to drop a map pin.
• While reading the document, change which comments you see by clicking the filter dropdown at the top of the page (which says All comments by default).

See also, What do all the icons mean? (Student)and How do I highlight and create, edit, or delete a comment?

Keeping track of your scores

• View your scores by clicking the My scores button on your course home page.  The scoring is based on the quality and timeliness of your comments, questions, and responses, and may include other measurements of engagement as determined by your instructor. See some examples of how quality is measured
• Here, you can also click the download button (to the right of your score) to download all your comments from each assignment.
• In order to see some details of a particular score, click My scores, then click on that particular assignment's score in the score column.
• If you don't see a score for an assignment, it's because your instructor hasn't released the scores for that assignment yet.
• You may continue to ask questions, answer questions, and make comments outside of the context of a particular reading assignment. However, note that if you edit a comment that was counted towards an assignment whose deadline has passed, that comment may no longer count towards your score for that assignment.

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