By Ensa Kinteh, Special to the Journal
Online classes can be somewhat challenging, especially if you are a working student. Juggling work and finding time later in the day to complete assignments can seem difficult, but it is very doable. Before I enrolled in online classes, I wondered how I would interact with my classmates, since we weren’t meeting in person. However, Perusall made that experience much easier and more engaging. Through Perusall, I was able to read articles, share my thoughts with my classmates and professor, and respond to their ideas. These interactions made it feel as though we were having real conversations, even though we were learning online.
Editor’s Note:
The article goes on to explain the benefits of using Perusall for classwork, but we thought it would be helpful to describe the platform for those who aren’t familiar with the application. Perusall is an online platform that allows students and instructors to annotate texts, videos, and other media collaboratively. Instructors can highlight important pieces of information and respond directly to student questions, while students can ask questions, compare and contrast points, and communicate with both the instructor and other students in real time.
This experience has encouraged me to recommend that current and prospective students fully utilize Perusall if their class uses it. It keeps students engaged with the course material and exposes them to different perspectives on the same reading. One strategy that I believe helps students get the most out of Perusall is to actively participate in the annotation activities. Although some of these activities may seem optional, I believe they should be encouraged, especially for online students. Active participation keeps students engaged with the reading and creates an environment where they can interact with their classmates and professors in meaningful ways, such as reading articles and listening to thought-provoking and intellectual discussions.
Every Perusall exercise and annotation comes with instructions. To benefit the most from it, students should read the instructions, reflect on them, and then respond to the annotations. It is very important to engage with other students’ posts, as this creates an opportunity for all students to learn from one another and gives students confidence that their posts are being read and responded to.
Sometimes professors share thought-provoking statements and questions and ask students to interact with them. Not only are the statements helpful and interesting, but they also give me a sense of pride and belonging because I am directly interacting with the professor. The professor responded and often asked follow-up questions. For example, another student and I posted on Perusall with similar lines of thinking about how we sometimes spend a lot of time on YouTube. Professor Withington responded and asked, “Should we be concerned about this? What can we do to counter it?” I thought this was very cool, because it showed that the professor was reading our posts and directly interacting with students.
Participating in Perusall annotation activities also helps students get better grades in their coursework. The interactions themselves can be graded and students receive points, which adds up to a good grade at the end of the semester. In essence, Perusall is not only a place where you write and post, but also a place where you read, reflect, and engage with the reading materials, and see how interested other students are in the reading materials.
The use of Perusall has exposed me to articles that I might not otherwise have come across, or even if I did, I might not have had the opportunity to engage with the articles and interact with my fellow classmates and professor the way I did. Very interesting articles were given to us to read and annotate, such as Media-Consciousness as Part of Resistance, Types of Bias in Media: Confirmation Bias, and Social Media Are Ruining Political Discourse, to name a few.
All these articles exposed students to different aspects of life that we are not aware of, even though they exist. One article that stood out to me was Jay David Bolter’s article on social media and political discourse. Through this article, I learned about the concept of flow — the use of a constant stream of media to keep viewers consuming media, but not engaging. It’s something that we have been experiencing all along but never really understood to be called flow. It sometimes forces me to think critically and reflect deeply about our surroundings and our subconscious.
It is my strongest recommendation that all online students engage heavily with Perusall, for it not only exposes students to articles they might not otherwise read but also creates an environment where they can engage in different activities related to their courses. It also encourages critical thinking and creates awareness of certain unspoken truths about our lives, as I briefly mentioned above. The use of Perusall makes online learning engaging and helps students become critical thinkers, better readers, and good communicators. If your course uses Perusall, make the most of it and you can become a more successful student.
