Perusall

Perusall is a social web annotation tool used by students at schools and universities across the world. It allows users to annotate the margins of a text in a virtual group setting that is similar to social media—with upvoting, emojis, chat functionality, and notification. It also includes automatic AI grading.

History
Perusall began as a research project at Harvard University. Then it became an educational product for students and teachers, a "collaborative annotation tool that helps students" and "promotes class engagement and discussion."

Teacher and Student Perspectives
According to Lemanski and Vennamen "Perusall is a useful resource for both university faculty and students to improve feelings of connectedness, reading of assigned textbooks and course materials, and satisfaction with the course textbook. [It] may increase overall student satisfaction with online coursework." Eisenreich and Disney found "that Perusall could be a quick fix to increase our students’ engagement."

Another student survey compared student preferences between Hypothes.is and Perusall. 41% of students preferred Perusall, 35% preferred Hypothesis, and 24% stated "no clear preference." The same study found that more student users wrote more annotations with Perusall than they did with hypothes.is, and more students also had a higher mean character volume per annotated paper for Perusall, than for hypothes.is.

Research by Jian-Wei Lin studied the impact of using social annotation: "The results showed that adopting collaborative annotations on formative assessments significantly enhanced the learning achievements of students and extended retention time..."

Other researchers have found that Perusall can contribute to deeper engagement for women and "minoritized" students: "An open annotation tool like Perusall can foster more equitable interactions for historically minoritized students. Women reported that open annotations deepened knowledge and engagement with the source and their peers. Women of color, in particular, acknowledged the benefits of social annotations as a tool that redistributes epistemic authority."

Functionality
Notably, Perusall was the first annotation program to "include AI-powered functions, like automated grading," which can sync with a course gradebook. Also, "Perusall, much like Hypothes.is, integrates with major LMSs, such as Canvas and Blackboard. This integration ... can help reduce instructor and student onboarding, make documents more easily accessible, and aid the coordination" of social annotation activities. Another study compared Perusall's “Machine Learning algorithm, which assesses the quality of annotations” with assessments done by teachers and found “scores quite similar to those of the teacher" and also that "students positively perceived the automated scoring.” Students can annotate text, images, equations, or even videos. Indeed, Perusall includes a catalog with "a large and growing number of books … The platform can also handle a wide range of other material types, including PDFs, EPUB book files, Word documents, Excel documents, source-code files, and snapshots of webpages."

Instructors can change the settings for automatic AI grading. Perusall can grade annotations based on many different criteria, including time spent reading, how well-distributed student annotations are, the number of annotations made, and the quality of each annotation.

Social Interaction
According to Eric Mazur at Harvard University, Perusall moves "information transfer and sense-making" from books to online, making "it interactive, promoting social interactions between students." In addition, he argues that "the platform promotes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to improve student performance."

Size
According to Perusall, they are currently "serving 2,000,000 students at 3,000 educational institutions in 90 countries."