Perusall automatically groups students in the course into smaller “discussion groups.” Students will only see the comments of other students in their group, plus any threads that an instructor has started.
Each document has a different set of groups formed, so students have an opportunity to interact with different people over the course of the semester. Groups for a particular document are fixed once the document is uploaded, to ensure students have a consistent view of each document.
The number of groups formed depends on the enrollment estimate and target group size, both of which can be updated through the course settings (Settings > Grouping). However, note that since the groups are fixed, changing these settings will not affect the groups for any documents already added to the course; they will instead take effect going forward for any documents uploaded after that point.
As a consequence of this, if a student is the first one in their group to comment on a particular document, then they won’t see any other comments in the document even though other students in the class may have also started commenting. This is normal; they should start to see other students’ comments as others in their group start reading and commenting on the document as well.
If you prefer to manually place students into groups, you can do so under Settings > Grouping. Here you can manually assign students to groups by entering a group number next to each student in your roster. For example, to place students A, B, C, and D into two groups, you could assign students A and B to group 1 and students C and D to group 2. Students that enroll in your course after you set the groups will be placed into one of the groups at random, but you can change this in the Grouping Options at any time.
Checkout How do groups work? on the Perusall website for more information.
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