Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 7, 2026

Perusall

Perusall is a social web annotation tool intended for use by students at schools and universities. 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.

Last revised
Jun 7, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
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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.56

References

References

  1. "About Perusall". Perusall. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  2. Hodgson, Justin. "Social Annotation as Writing: Promising Technologies and Practices in Writing Studies". Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  3. King, Gary. "An Introduction to Perusall" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  4. ""What is Perusall?"". Montclair State University Instructional Design and Tech. Montclair State University. Retrieved 13 January 2023.
  5. King, Gary. "An Introduction to Perusall" (PDF). Harvard University. Retrieved 16 January 2023.
  6. Clarke, Andrew (2021). "Perusall: Social learning platform for reading and annotating". Journal of Political Science Education. 17 (1): 149–154. doi:10.1080/15512169.2019.1649151. S2CID 202328976.
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