Interactive Reading with Perusall: Engaging Students Through Social Annotation

Mee-Jeong Park, PhD¹

Alexander Tang^1,2

​

​University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa

¹ East Asian Languages and Literatures

² Center for Language and Technology

What is Perusall?

• A new type of collaborative e-book reader
• Based on extensive data analytics, behavioral science, and educational research
• Developed at Harvard by Gary King, Brian Lukoff, and Eric Mazur
• Students
• Complete readings; learn more
• Stay engaged and motivated; enjoy the experience
• Instructors:
• No extra work; save considerable time
• Improve classroom teaching
• No cost:
• Perusall itself is free
• Readings you have rights to: drag and drop to perusall.com
• Books or articles for purchase: Perusall obtains content & permissions from publishers. Students usually pay less than for print version

What Happens�When You’re Assigned Reading?

Students

• They triage – let some courses die to save others
• How many comply with reading assignments: 20-30%
• How many buy the book? <50%
• How to get them to read?
• Frequent quizzes, extra homework
• Make grades depend on them
• Test very specific points from the readings
• Spend huge amounts of your time!

Faculty

• When motivated (prepare for class or to learn): we do all the reading
• When unmotivated, forced or assigned readings?
• We’re the same as the students! Want proof?
• Do you do human subjects research?
• Did you take the CITI training?
• Did you do the reading before trying the test?
• Did you look at the readings after getting some answers wrong?

Perusall: students do >90% of the reading

So what’s wrong? Why don’t they read?

• Intrinsic motivators are backwards:
• Human value collective experiences�(e.g., why the concerts costs more than the iTunes download)
• Reading is a solitary experience�(e.g. the stalling MOOC revolution : Collective -> Solitary)
• Extrinsic motivators (grades) are weak, unless:
• Faculty waste time preparing quizzes
• Students waste time taking them
• Everyone wastes class or prep time
• The Perusall Solution
• Transform the reading experience: Solitary -> Collective
• Extrinsic motivation (no instructor effort): Automated grading

How does it work?

• Assign readings & annotations
• Students share questions, answers, perspectives, external knowledge in threads
• Can annotate text, images or equations
• Classmates motivate
• Perusall grades engagement
• Non-adversarial grading; Perusall nudges students not keeping up

What happens when motivated students get stuck?

Presently: Eyes off the page

• Stop reading, hope you get it in class
• Make believe you understand it and keep reading
• Wait until office hours
• Find another student
• Ask a question via email or a forum

Perusall: Eyes on the page

• Annotate the readings: ask questions in context
• Out-of-class experience centered on the readings
• Get response immediately from other students
• If you’ve left, expect email with an answer (can respond within the email)
• When students figure it out together: Learning is deeper and remembered longer

At the start of class, “Any Questions?”

Presently:

• Hearing questions and confusions: hugely important in learning
• They have lots of questions, but no one moves
• They’ve just trouped across campus, thinking about their last class, plopped their backpacks and coats down, expecting to be entertained
• A big missed opportunity

Perusall:

• Just before class, print a Student Confusion Report with the top 3-4 topics of confusion or engagement, and the best student annotations
• Walk into class; skip the “any questions” game
• Go through the topics, recognizing students with good questions or comments

Example Student Confusion Report

• One page, easy to digest before class�
• See confusions or engagements in context�
• Annotations remain live�
• Highlights best student annotations

Automated Engagement

• Classes of any size
• “Annotations groups” (of about 20) constructed from your class automatically to optimize engagement
• Perusall can seed your class with annotations from another predicted to generate engagement
• If a student skips pp. 61-67
• Perusall checks the important concepts missed
• Students gets a private nudge about the point on p. 63
• As class nears, Perusall monitors continuously
• Who hasn’t done the reading or isn’t engaged
• Who isn’t going to get 100% on the annotation assignment
• Carefully timed, unobtrusive notes with help and direction
• Instructor gets: a window on student learning
• A dashboard with grading suggestions
• Info about individual student engagement & performance
• Alerts for students with serious problems

Administrative

• Works differently across fields:
• In technical fields, students use Perusall to understand what the text explains, to get past hurdles
• In the humanities, Perusall engages students with the meaning of the text itself
• Integrates with your university’s LMS for single sign-on
• FERPA compliant; university administration friendly; no advertising
• Student identities not shared with corporate recruiters or anyone outside of class
• Students buy content through Perusall (online or via a code from your book store); usually pay less
• Publishers love it (keeps their content central; 100% sell-through, no resales, the ultimate solution to IP piracy)
• Many other features; under active development; suggestions welcome

Dr. Mee-Jeong Park’s Experience �Using Perusall

Questions?��Center for Language and Technology: cltmanoa@hawaii.edu� �Dr. Mee-Jeong Park: meejeong@hawaii.edu