Perusall

Perusall is a social annotation and course-reading platform founded to improve pre-class preparation and close-read comprehension. Originating from research at Harvard (launched commercially in the early 2010s), Perusall positions itself as a learning-focused alternative to static readings by embedding collaborative annotation directly into course materials. The core value proposition is to convert passive reading into active, graded participation by combining text, discussion, and analytics so instructors can see who prepared and understand where groups struggled. Perusall is primarily marketed to colleges, high schools, and educational programs that need scalable, evidence-based reading engagement.

Perusall’s feature set centers on four concrete capabilities. First, the social annotation workspace supports PDFs, EPUBs, Microsoft Word, and web pages where students highlight and comment inline; instructors can reply, pin instructor notes, and mark confusing passages. Second, the automatic grading engine scores annotations for timeliness, relevance, and responsiveness using configurable rubrics, producing participation grades without manual bookkeeping. Third, analytics dashboards show per-student and per-page metrics — such as engagement heatmaps, average annotation depth, and a pre-class “who read” report — which can be exported to LMS gradebooks. Fourth, Perusall integrates reading material procurement and library access, allowing instructors to import publisher ebooks, add OER, upload custom PDFs, or link to articles; permissions and DRM support vary by publisher.

Pricing for Perusall is institution-oriented rather than simple individual monthly plans. There is no permanently free unlimited plan: individual instructors and students commonly access Perusall through institutional licenses or publisher-provided access. Perusall offers free trial periods for instructors and limited free access for students if their institution or a course provides materials; full-featured access and analytics require an institutional subscription or publisher-supplied ebook codes. Enterprise/department pricing is custom — schools negotiate per-student or per-course licensing. Some campuses pay per-student-per-year or flat department fees; exact costs vary significantly and require a quote from Perusall’s sales team.

Perusall is widely used in higher education classrooms, flipped-learning undergraduate courses, graduate seminars, and secondary-school ELA classrooms. For example, a university English professor uses Perusall to assign weekly close readings, monitor engagement with page-level analytics, and automate participation grades. A community college librarian leverages Perusall to deliver curated primary-source readers for research methods courses, tracking which students accessed sources. Compared to a competitor such as Hypothesis, Perusall emphasizes course integration, auto-grading, and publisher ebook workflows, making it better suited for courses that require assessment and institutional licensing support.