Perusall for Instructors

Fall 2025 courses are now using the 1.3 LTI. For information about the new version of Perusall, including how to copy over previous semesters’ Perusall content, please see this transition guide.

Perusall is a social annotation tool that allows students and instructors to engage with and transform written material in a social media-like environment. Student and instructor engagement with the text can help to facilitate class discussions and collaborative learning. Perusall is available to all Penn instructors, staff, and students through Canvas at no cost.

This page is intended for instructors. Students should review Perusall for Students.

Copyright & Licensing

Perusall is integrated into Canvas and free to students and instructors at the University. Perusall also has relationships with several publishers, and students may purchase and use textbooks through the Perusall platform. 

Instructors may use Perusall to share public domain materials, open-access resources, and personal course materials such as syllabi and class notes. For works under copyright, instructors are responsible for ensuring that their use of the Perusall tool complies with Penn’s Computing and Acceptable Use Policy, applicable copyright laws, and other related policies, including appropriate use of Canvas.  

Resources licensed by Penn Libraries are not typically linked with Perusall. Even if the Libraries have a license for the content, this license may not allow for use of the resource within Perusall. More information on the appropriate use of library-licensed materials can be found in the Use Policy for “Penn Only” Electronic Resources and Using Electronic Resources. For copyright questions, please consult the Library’s Copyright Resources or contact Assistant General Counsel/Copyright Advisor Stephen Wolfson (smw@upenn.edu). 

The default setting for documents uploaded to Perusall is that students cannot download them. We recommend that this setting remain in place to prevent unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content.

Accessing Perusall

To access and enable Perusall in a Canvas course site:

1. Log into Canvas.
2. Click Courses and choose a specific course.
3. Once in the course, enable Perusall in your course settings.
4. Click Perusall in the course navigation menu.

Once the instructor has set up their assignments and is happy with their course settings, we recommend hiding this Perusall button from the course navigation. Students will be able to access the Perusall assignment directly through the assignment in the module, which alleviates confusion as to which assignment or document they should be working on.

Getting Started

When setting up Perusall in a new course, instructors will be greeted with a prompt to either start from scratch or roll forward a previous iteration. 

If instructors are using Perusall in Fall 2025 and want to use content from an older course, please use the 1.1 to 1.3 transition guide.

If instructors are new to Perusall, follow the setup prompts in the setup wizard.

Please note: Penn has an institutional license, so students will not encounter fees.

We recommend paying close attention to three essential categories when selecting course settings: 1) Scoring and Analytics, 2) Release Scores to Students, and 3) the LMS Gradebook Columns Management.

Perusall’s Getting Started documentation covers each of these categories as well as information on setting up readings and assignments, but if instructors have additional questions, they should reach out to their Local Support Provider.

During setup, Perusall offers a low-stakes getting-started assignment so students can become familiar with the platform. Instructors also have the option to upload their syllabus and make their syllabus into a close reading assignment.

Perusall now offers the ability to set up Peer Review assignments. For more information about Peer Review, please consult Perusall’s Peer Review guide.

Groups

If you would like students to work on a Perusall assignment in a specific group, you may sync your Canvas groups to Perusall. Please note that Perusall automatically breaks up large classes into smaller groups so the document is not overwhelming to read with too many annotations.

Grading and Canvas Grade Passback

All grades for all Perusall assignments will be viewable on the left-hand side of Perusall navigation under the title Gradebook. Depending on the settings, these grades may automatically be released to students after the due date, or depend on a manual review from the instructor before being released back to Canvas.  

Perusall allows instructors to view all comments in the document or a spreadsheet-like format. Perusall can assist by pointing out “high volume areas” with many questions or comments that Perusall calls “confusion areas” that may require clarification from the instructor.  

We recommend Perusall’s guide on reviewing student work to learn more about the review process and how to get the most out of viewing students’ comments. 

Perusall can pass back grades to the Canvas Gradebook. You may set up a single passback that computes the average grade of all Perusall assignments, or you may score each Perusall assignment individually. Instructors can always override grades that are calculated by Perusall.

Common Use Cases

Consider using Perusall to:

• Offer options for individual or group comments and note-sharing.
• Give students the ability to organize concepts, responses, and discussion themes using hashtags.
• Provide an avenue for formal or informal interaction with course content.
• Create a space for low-stakes collaborative discussion surrounding web-based resources in multiple media formats.
• Offer exportable snapshots for collections of quotations and figures.
• Directly adopt textbooks into the platform.
• Provide granular information about student interactions with content, including engagement time, confusion reports, posting frequency, and downloadable CSV files of all student annotations within a text.
• Make content accessible through the option to “read aloud” in multiple languages.

Additional Resources

• Perusall for Students
• Leganto (Course Reserves)
• Copyright Resources to Support Publishing and Teaching

Getting Help

Please contact your Local Support Provider or submit a request to canvas@pobox.upenn.edu.