Perusall to the Rescue!

A response to the It’s Alive! Activity
created by Christopher Rowe (@ChristopherRowe)

Number of views: 443

This has been such a valuable exercise…

I began by communicating with my students about their experiences in our program.  During this pandemic, many of them expressed frustration with the significant use of the lecture model being simply transported into an online environment through systems like Zoom and Bongo.  They weren’t feeling engaged in the content and found it difficult to focus.  As a result, I decided to find a system that would provide a more engaging experience for synchronous sessions in an online delivery model.  I came across the Perusall platform and attended a webinar to learn more about how it could be used to execute a flipped classroom, shifting the information transfer out of the synchronous session.  Ideating and prototyping were fairly simple, as most of this process is built directly into the user interface of the platform, but I did have to do some thinking about the creation of the content and how to get it onto the system.  Video uploaded onto YouTube, for access on Trello.  Finally, as an experiment, I introduced the platform with my content loaded to a small group of students to play with and get their feedback.  The results were super positive, and I’ve attached a screenshot of one student’s interactions with it.  The next step will be to get the system integrated into our LMS and roll it out for real in preparation for an upcoming class.  I’m looking forward to seeing it in action.