This article covers:

Creating your course

Adding readings to your course

Creating assignments

Setting course policies

Inviting students or course staff to join

Viewing discussions within the text

Managing groups

Managing grades

Creating your course

• To create a standalone course, create an account at perusall.com; the onboarding process will walk you through course creation.
• To create a course that is integrated with your Learning Management System (LMS), read our documentation on setting up the integration. Then you will create the course through your LMS.
• The course creation process is the same whether you start on Day 1 or Day 30 of the course! 

Adding readings to your course

1. Click on Library on your course home page.
2. To add a book from Perusall's catalog, click Add > Textbook.
3. To upload a reading (PDF or EPUB format) from your computer, click Add > Documents from my computer or Add > Documents from Dropbox.
4. To add a web page as a reading, click Add > Web page.

Creating assignments

1. Click on Assignments on your course home page.
2. Click Add assignment and select the document you want to assign.
3. Select the part of the document to assign, specify a deadline, and click Save changes. Learn more about managing assignments

Setting course policies

• Navigate to Settings > General to set overall course policies about assignment availability and scoring.
• Navigate to Settings > Grouping to manage discussion groups. Learn more about groups
• Navigate to Settings > Scoring to determine how Perusall will generate engagement scores.
• Navigate to Settings > Advanced to adjust fine-grained course options.

Inviting students or course staff to join

1. Navigate to Settings > Access.
2. The course code shown there can be given to students so they can enroll in the course. (If you are integrating with your LMS then students do not need a course code.) 
3. Invite other instructors or TAs to join your Perusall course as instructors with an email invitation.

Viewing discussions within the text

1. Navigate to Course home.
2. Open a document in the Library tab, or open an assignment in the Assignments tab.
3. When you (or your students) open a document, you'll see highlights superimposed on the document that represent comments that students have entered.
4. Highlight text by clicking and dragging. You will see a new conversation panel appear on the right side of the page. Enter a comment or question, and press Enter to save it.
5. When you start a comment thread, the text you highlighted will show in blue; student comments are highlighted in yellow.
6. When someone responds to a question or comment, the original author receives a notification by email and can post their own response by replying to the email. Students that ask a question can also indicate that one or more of the responses answers their original question.
7. Control the highlights that you see by clicking the All comments filter dropdown at the top of the page and selecting a filter.

Managing groups

To avoid an unwieldy experience for large courses, students are automatically placed into groups for each document; students can only see and respond to comments and questions made by other students in their group. Learn more about groups

Managing grades

• Perusall's automatic grading engine will automatically score all student work and assign an overall assignment score.  If you would like to disable automatic grading go to Settings > General, Scroll Down to "Release Scores to Students," and choose "Never (hide the gradebook and disable Perusall's automatic scoring)."
• View these scores by navigating to the Gradebook.
• Within the gradebook, click on a score to reveal additional details about how the score was computed.
• Use the pencil icon to manually override or enter a grade for a student.
• Students will not see their scores until you "release" them. Release scores for an assignment by clicking the button at the bottom of that column, or enable automatic grade release within Settings > General.