Student-centered learning with Perusall

Learning is a social experience — it requires interactivity. Most students learn best by engaging with content, reflecting on it, and engaging with their peers. Moving pre-class reading assignments to an asynchronous and self-paced environment improves completion rates of these assignments. Perusall, a free social learning platform, permits one to move online the information-transfer that normally takes place in a lecture and make this information transfer interactive. In addition, the platform promotes intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to learn. In this workshop we will demonstrate the platform, explain how to set up a course with Perusall, and how to best promote meaningful student participation.

After participating in this workshop, participants will be able to

• Integrate Perusall in their educational approach
• Set up a course in Perusall and upload course materials
• Adjust the assessment settings to match the learning goals of their class
• Use Perusall to identify gaps in students’ knowledge and understanding, and optimize synchronous instruction time with their students