Enrolling in your course

If your instructor has integrated Perusall with your learning management system (e.g., Blackboard, Canvas, Desire2Learn), no enrollment is needed. Simply click on the appropriate Perusall assignment links within your LMS.  Otherwise,

1. To login to Perusall, type perusall.com into the address bar in your browser, and click Login.
2. Create an account using your email address and password, or log in with your Facebook, Twitter, or Google accounts.
3. The onboarding process will prompt you for a course code from your instructor.

Starting a reading assignment

1. Once you log in, you will be directed to the course homepage, which shows you a list of all the reading assignments and deadlines that your instructor has assigned for the course.
2. To access the reading assignment, click on the link for that assignment. 
3. If you are accessing a textbook, you may be prompted to purchase it if you haven't previously. You can purchase online with a credit card, or you can purchase a Perusall access code at your college bookstore that you can redeem within Perusall for access to the book.

Starting conversations with classmates

• 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).

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 annotations 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.

Tutorial Video: Standalone Accounts

Tutorial Video: LMS Accounts