Getting started for instructors

Create your account 

There are two ways to create a course, which determine how you should set up your account:

1. Learning Management System (LMS) integrated course: 
   An LMS-integrated course is created and accessed through your school's LMS (e.g., Canvas, Blackboard, D2L, Moodle, etc). 
   • Refer to our setup documentation for installation instructions. 
   • Once installed, launch into Perusall. This will create your account and connect to your new Perusall course. 
   • Follow the Get Started steps to complete your course setup. 
2. Standalone course: 
   A standalone course is created and accessed directly at perusall.com. To create a standalone course:
   • Create your Perusall account.
   • Follow the Get Started steps to set up your course.

To manage your profile, accessibility, and account settings, etc., navigate to your icon on the top right corner of your screen, and select the dropdown menu.

Course set up

Our setup wizard will guide you through six steps to create your course. (Don’t worry—you can always adjust the settings later.)

• Select to create a brand new course or copy an existing course. 
  
• Upload your syllabus to make it easily accessible in your course Library. You can also choose to create a syllabus review assignment and/or add one of our pre-made assignments, Making the most of learning with Perusall. This helps students get familiar with the platform before diving into the course content.
  
• Select a book from 1 million plus titles in our catalog! If you prefer not to add a book, skip this step. You can also upload your own materials to the course Library after course set up. 
  
• If your course only uses free materials or your institution does not have a license, you can choose to add a course fee. This fee, set at your discretion, will be paid by students and will help support Perusall. To learn more, see this article: The Course Choice Model; What is the cost of Perusall?

  

• In step 5, fill out the basic settings of your course and whether and how you want to use scoring and analytics in your course. 
  
  Perusall's automatic grading engine will automatically score all student work in an assignment and assign an overall score. You can control how Perusall incorporates various metrics of engagement into students’ overall scores. There are four options.

  • Automatic grading and engagement analytics
    
    Perusall will provide data about student engagement for review, and assignments will be graded automatically.  You can always override automatically-assigned grades and decide when they are displayed to students.
     
  • Manual grading and engagement analytics
    
    Perusall will provide data about student engagement for your review.  Assignments will not be graded automatically, but you can review student engagement data and manually assign score to students' assignment submissions.
  • Disable grading, but provide engagement analytics
    
    Perusall will provide data about student engagement for your review.  All assignments will be ungraded and the gradebook will be disabled.
  • Disable all analytics
    
    Perusall will not provide data about student engagement.  All assignments will be ungraded and the gradebook will be disabled.

  If you are using Perusall's automatic grading and engagement analytics, learn more in the following articles:
  
  How scoring works  
  
  How do I use scoring templates?
  
  How do I use rubrics?

• Depending on how you created your course—LMS integration or standalone—the final step explains how to enroll students and provides tips for student use. 
  
  LMS Integration: At the top of the screen, you'll see how your course was created. Students must launch the external tool link to connect to your course, which will automatically create their account if they don’t already have one.
  
  Standalone: You will need to share either the course enrollment code or the enrollment URL with your students. 
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Perusall allows instructors to customize their courses to fit their specific needs. Navigate to Settings in the left navigation sidebar to configure overall course information. For more information, see the article: How can I customize my course settings?

Managing the Library

The Library in Perusall is a centralized space where instructors can upload and organize course materials for students to engage with whether inside an assignment or directly from the Library tab. 

To access and manage your course materials:

1. Navigate to Course home.
2. Select  Library on your course home page.
3. Click + Add Content and choose the type of content you’d like to add, including a book from our catalog.

Related articles: 

• How do I manage my course content? What materials can I use? 
• How do I adopt a textbook using Perusall?
• What are folders?

Creating assignments

The Assignments tab in Perusall is where instructors create and organize assignments based off the content from the Library. 

1. Navigate to Course home.
2. Select  Assignments on your course home page.
3. Click + Add assignment and select the specific assignment type you want to create from the dropdown menu.

Related articles: 

• Learn more about managing assignments.
• How do I create a differentiated assignment?
• How do Review-Based Assignments work?
• How do my students make the most of social learning?

Viewing discussions and creating comments

Open a document in the Library tab or an assignment in the Assignments tab. When highlights appear on the document, they represent comments that students have entered. Conversations initiated by students will appear as yellow highlights, while conversations initiated by an instructor will appear as blue highlights.

To highlight, click and drag your mouse using our annotate text tool or annotate figure tool. (how do I highlight and create, edit or delete a comment?). Once highlighted, a new conversation bubble will appear in the right-side panel. Enter a comment or question, and press Enter to save it. 

• Annotate text tool:
  
   
• Annotate figure tool:
  
   

The toolbar above the content screen and right-side panel provide many social annotation tools users can use to enhance their experience. To learn more, see below:

• What do all the icons mean? For instructors
• How do I filter my view of comments or highlights?
• How can I add comments or questions directed to students?

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