Perusall

Perusall is a social web annotation tool intended for use by students at schools and universities.^[1] It allows users to annotate the margins of a text in a virtual group setting that is similar to social media—with upvoting, emojis, chat functionality, and notification. It also includes automatic AI grading.^[2]

History

Perusall began as a research project at Harvard University.^[3] It later became an educational product for students and teachers.^[4]

As of 2024, Perusall states more than 5 million students have used the tool at over 5,000 educational institutions in 112 countries."^[1]

Functionality

Perusall integrates with learning management systems such as Moodle, Canvas and Blackboard to aid with collaborative annotation.^[2]

The tool supports annotation of a range of media including text, images, equations, videos, PDFs and snapshots of webpages.^[5][6]