Collaborative Reading and Video Watching with Perusall

Perusall is a free social reading platform integrated into Moodle which allows students (and teaching staff) to digitally annotate readings and videos collectively and respond to each other’s comments and questions. It creates an environment for online collaborative reading and discussion and provides auto-marking of student comments and the analytics which will enable you to see not only who has completed the set readings but also to measure their interaction with the text.

The tool was first introduced to Monash community by Prof. Eric Mazur from Harvard University in 2016. We have done several trials in the following years but they were not that successful. This is mainly due to the copyright restriction at that time that we could not upload the needed reading documents into Perusall while it only supports documents but not video before 2020. At the end of 2019, Dr. Jeff Wang from Marketing and the Educational Designer Tristan Cui came up with an innovative idea of using Perusall in their flipped unit MKF5955 - Marketing management: Theory and practice. After students watched the online lecture videos before class, they were required to comment on marketing theory applications in the lecture slides before they attended face-to-face class. This assessment was designed to replace the traditional MCQ after video watching, to keep students engaged on the social learning platform, and provide the teacher with an overview of student confusion topics. The students were quite engaged in the assessment and went to the tutorials better prepared.

And finally, some major journal publishers, such as Ebsco Host, Gale Cengage Expanded Academic, Jstor and, Taylor&Francis, approved our requests and allow us to use their articles in Perusall. In S1 2020, Dr. Glen Croy has carefully chosen articles from those publishers and organised pre-class reading assessment for his unit MGX3121 - International business strategy. Students read and commented on the selected articles actively. The reading formed the basis for students' topical discussions to start class each week, and proved very useful for their assignments.

Following the success of the two units, more Buseco teachers begin to try Perusall in S2. Dr Marjorie Jerrard from Management and Dr. Toan Le from BLT have also set up their Perusall assessments. Also, Perusall has just announced that it starts to support student annotation on videos. It will be really interesting to see how students interact while watching your lecture recordings. If you are interested in that as well, please feel free to get in touch with us and we can have a chat. Here is a shot video of Perusall journey at the University of Groningen. The feedback from the teachers and students there are also valuable to our design as well.