Canvas setup

Initial Setup

To connect Perusall to Canvas, set up Perusall as an LTI app under Settings > Apps (search for Perusall in the App Center), and add your key and secret. Contact Perusall Support from your official university email address to retrieve your institution's key and secret. (For security verification purposes, provide Perusall Support with a link to an institutional web page that shows your name, email address, and title/affiliation.)  Then you can add a Perusall navigation link to your course sidebar under Settings > Navigation.

Click on this link to launch Perusall and create a new course in Perusall that maps to your course in Canvas. Once you have done this, students can also click this link to launch into your Perusall course from Canvas.

If you do not see Perusall listed in your App Center, you can set it up manually. Select "View App Configurations," and then click "+ App". Then select "By URL" under Configuration Type, and enter https://perusall.com/downloads/lti-config.xml for the Config URL. Set Privacy to "Public."

Setting up assignments

To enable grade sync, create assignments in Canvas that map to assignments in Perusall. For each reading assignment you create in Perusall, create a corresponding assignment in Canvas. Each assignment should be created as an External Tool assignment in Canvas, pointing to Perusall.

To link each assignment in Canvas to the proper assignment in Perusall, make sure that the name of the assignment in Canvas 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 Assignments panel on your course home page in Perusall, and then click the Copy Title for LMS button in the toolbar. The assignment name will be copied to the clipboard, and you can paste it into the assignment name field in Canvas.

To test that the assignment linkage works, launch the assignment in Canvas 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 Canvas.

Note: To ensure that grade sync works throughout the semester, make sure that students access each Perusall assignment by clicking through the corresponding assignment in Canvas. If a student accesses an assignment in Perusall without clicking through the corresponding Canvas assignment at least once, then Perusall will not be able to send that student's score back to Canvas.

Troubleshooting

See our general LMS troubleshooting page for common issues.