Written by Assistant Professor Sudha Sankar.

One tool. Two very different results.

In 2025, I set out to increase student engagement with reading materials in my classes.  With the support of a DELTA Express Grant, I adopted Perusall in two graduate distance education courses. Perusall is a collaborative annotation platform that offers an interactive experience akin to certain social media platforms. Students in one course enjoyed it and demonstrated higher-quality engagement, while students in the other course responded with mixed reviews. What I learned: it isn’t about the tool – it’s about the fit between the course and the tool, or at least the way the tool is used. 

Where It Worked

I first implemented Perusall in a discussion-rich course that invited students to explore ethics and policy frameworks, weigh them against their own professional contexts, engage in perspective-taking, critical reflection, and negotiate moral and ethical tensions. Using perusal, students dove into readings collaboratively and analyzed case studies together. The tool allowed students to highlight and comment on specific content, show appreciation by upvoting others’ annotations, and respond to their peers, adding to and extending discussions on the content. The readings in this course were meant to spark questions and debate, not produce a single right answer — which is exactly what collaborative annotation, in its default form, is good at.

Student feedback was very positive and showed that students found the platform easy to use, and they valued seeing peers’ perspectives. My own observations were that students showed a lot more interest in the material itself; they questioned and interrogated the readings and one another more, resulting in richer discussion. Annotating together seems to have made the process of completing course readings more social and less stressful. A colleague who reviewed the course applauded the use of Perusall and indicated that she may adopt the tool in her own courses.

Where It Didn’t

Following the success of this initial adoption, I implemented the same tool in another course that faced the same challenge: variable student engagement with assigned readings. This time, it was a foundational methods course – scientific inquiry – a more detail-oriented procedural and technical course. In this course, students read to learn how to do something: write good research questions, design a study, write literature reviews, understand and meet IRB regulations, how to collect and analyze different types of data, etc. Here, the readings are meant to produce clarity, not leave students debating what their peers thought about it. Both the previous ethics course and this one used the same structure (e.g. flipped classroom, Moodle integration, same Perusall setup). Student feedback about the use of Perusall to explore course readings together was mostly negative. Some students found it overwhelming, while others said it was distracting and did not help them learn. I could see the difference: annotations lacked substance and student interactions were awkward. 

Takeaways: What’s next?

Before adopting any collaborative annotation tool, it might be helpful to ask ourselves what we are teaching and what purpose the collaborative annotation serves in the course. Depending on the type of course, the nature of the material (constructive or interpretive vs. factual and procedural), and the desired outcome (developing perspectives and meaning vs. mastering skills and concepts), it may be that a tool like Perusall is either not a good fit for the course or needs to be deployed differently. It occurs to me that a collaborative annotation tool like Perusall could still be useful in a methods course, not on reference readings, but on annotating sample work products. I.e., literature reviews, methods sections and IRB applications. Perusall then becomes the tool and platform where they apply what they have learned to real examples, identifying where it does its job and where it falls short. 

Want to try it?

My Perusall work was funded through a DELTA Instructional Tools Express Grant — a $2,000, one-semester award that pairs you with DELTA staff to pilot a new tool.  DELTA’s Perusall support page and Teaching Resources guide can get you started with Perusall, and the LearnTech Help Desk(learntech@ncsu.edu) can help with integration.