The Perusall Experience

Throughout my journey in flipped and mastery based learning, I’ve come across many apps, websites and tech tools. I routinely joined the Early Adopter crowds for a lot of wonderful tools. Nowadays, I rarely add a new tool. I much rather mimic the behavior within my LMS or Google Drive ecosystems - even if performed in an inferior way. Perusall may have broken through my apprehension. 

I’ve been aware of Perusall for a couple of years or so. It is a social annotation tool that began with giving teachers the ability to assign texts and embedding questions and discussions withi  the text. Students can add and respond to these annotations. Had I been an English teacher, I probably would have dove right into that early adopter pool. But since the majority of the content in my class is covered through flipped videos, there was only limited value added from that tool. 

Even when Perusall began to include videos into their platform, I remained hesitant to embrace this tool. Yes, my students could benefit from greater interactivity in my videos. It is surely better than relying exclusively on basic checks for understanding through EdPuzzle or the post-video discussion forums or Google Forms assessments. But I’ve remained skeptical on just how MUCH better is the Perusall way of handling videos. 

Two recent experiences have caused me to reconsider. During the pandemic, I’ve really been much more mindful of how I spend my face to face time. With the changes caused by remote learning, this time is scarce and more precious than ever. I’ve leaned more into student collaboration and discussion. I’ve also turned over class time for more student presentations this year. Student presentations are tough for me as a flipped teacher because I rarely use synchronous time to lecture anymore, so it stands to reason that using precious face to face time for student lectures is also problematic. But, presenting is an important skill, so I press on. I’ll come back to this idea later.

The second experience is the recent asynchronous conference: The Perusall Exchange. This was a two week conference about Perusall hosted on the Perusall platform. As far as I can tell, the presenters were all college professors who use Perusall to support student learning. On the first day, I “attended” two presentations. These presentations were actually flipped videos created by the professors and posted within a course hosted on Perusall. The presenters posted questions and discussion starters, while audience members responded and participated. Audience members also asked questions to presenters, who were able to respond mostly asynchronously. Perusall allows for comment tagging and also lets you know who else is watching the same video. This was truly an innovative and interesting professional development experience. I was able to learn at times convenient for me. But I’ve also been able to interact with the presenters, evidenced by a response to a comment I left at 5am on the first day. 

One idea I’m excited about is offloading the student presentations to videos. This is not a new idea. I’ve done this before with limited success because student peers had limited engagement with student created videos. The logistics were tough to figure out. How can I encourage legitimate engagement with student created videos and hold students accountable? How can I help student presenters encourage engagement with their content? If my student presenters post their videos to a class on Perusall, then I can help presenters create engaging questions and prompts throughout the video, give peer audience members guidance about how to engage and hold the audience accountable for their level of engagement. When students create presentations, I’m not as interested in whether peers can answer factual content questions, as they would with my videos. Rather, I’m interested in peers being engaged with the provocative questions and issues presented by other students. (To be clear, I am also interested in students engaging with my videos in this way as well, but the entire learning cycle of activities are designed to elicit this deep and rich application of the content I present. I don’t have the luxury or even desire to create these post video activities aligned with student presentations. Rather, I need a quick yet powerful mechanism for students to engage with their presentations of their peers.) Perusall appears to address this need. 

The beauty and unintended consequences of this approach is now it would absolutely make sense to make the most of Perusall. Prior to using Perusall for engagement with student created content, using Perusall for the ocasional article or text within my class did not seem worth the hassle. Adding this function with Perusall now makes a lot of sense and I'm looking forward to testing this in the new school year. 

A Glimpse into the Future of #flipclass: a one year anniversary blog reflection

Flickr // Nubobo

This is the one year anniversary of Wilson's Flipped Lab, the blog where I reflect on my experiments, successes and failures in the flipped class. It's fitting that I originally started this blog exactly a year ago as a project during FlipCon 13 (explained here) because today is the first day of FlipCon 14. I'm happy to report 63 blog entries of my thoughts and experiences in this past year. I'm hopeful that other flipped teachers and those considering the flip have and will continue to learn from this chronicling. I'm unsure how many read this blog but it has been successful in it's intended purpose to help me reflect about my pedagogy. 

Many of my posts have been about the immediate past or immediate future. I'd like to take this opportunity to dream years into the future. These are the hopes for my courses. 

- Self directed passion-based learning: What if my students can pick and choose which topics to explore, projects and experiments to design, which content to curate and choose from in order to learn, and how to best represent their learning? What if students decided how to be assessed and what standards and levels to be evaluated by? 

- Authentic assignments and audiences: what if students were always engaged in an authentic learning experience to be shared with a global and authentic audience? What if their learning occurred as a necessary component of solving a real world problem that would help countless other people? What if students no longer have to ask, "why am I learning this?" What if the purpose of learning all of the skills and content of the course were self evident and inherently obvious to my students?

- Students learning from students: what if the primary learning materials were created and curated by students? What if students learned from and were held accountable by other students? 

These are the burning questions that I struggle with. In my current practice, I am far away from answering them. Yet, I see the seeds to answering them. Whether it is setting up an asynchronous course, curating alternative and optional learning opportunities and learning materials, aligning these materials to each course standard, or creating real world case studies and projects, I have a glimpse into a more student directed and centered education. I must have the courage and discipline to transform these wonderings into action. 

Related articles

• Looking Back on My First Full Year of Flipped Learning
• Flipclass Resolutions in the New Year: Week 15 reflections
• New Beginnings on Flipped Day
• The Results of a Semester of Flip Class

Introducing Alternative Assessment & Peer Instruction in the Flipped Class: Week 7 reflections

Students only had an exploration, video, problem set and Moodle quiz  because I wanted to add some breathing room for students to catch up to my pace. I also instituted peer instruction at the beginning of lessons. Students are all over the place - anywhere from one week behind to one week ahead. The number of ahead students has increased in the last day or so. After next week, I plan to speed up the pace a bit and offer more synchronous activities.

Successes:

One cool thing that has emerged from post quiz conferences is pin pointing each student's conceptual issues. In previous weeks, I suggested struggling students to work through pre-planned remediation modules after a quiz. The pre-planned modules are divided into topics, so students always had the choice of how to spend their time. But these conferences have better equipped me to recommend certain tasks or to create remedial tasks on the spot. A few examples will make the point. Two students struggled on the same quiz but had different issues. One student couldn't couldn't decipher the difference between codominance and incomplete dominance, while another student had some issues solving blood typing Punnett Squares, which included codominance. For the first student, I told him to create a list of traits (the weirder the better.) He had to imagine the appearance of a heterozygote, in situations where the trait displayed codominance and incomplete dominance. I pointed the second student to a blood typing reading and online practice quiz that was already part of the remedial module. I'm also adding more remedial activities to the modules because these conferences are uncovering areas of confusion that I did not anticipate in the planning phase. It would've been difficult to identify and offer specialized remediation without the post quiz conferences built into the class period, courtesy of the flipped model. My eduwin for the week is using post quiz conferences to suggest tailor made remediation.

I really love adding a synchronous activity to the beginning of class. It changes the feel. It's slowed things down a bit and made the class feel whole. I'm glad that I opted to go with peer instruction instead of a tracking journal at the beginning of the class. The tracking journal could've helped with goal setting and slowed down the pace but it would not have the added benefits of peer instruction. I posted a scenario with a multiple choice answer. It was an engaging and conceptually rigorous question. Students thought about their answer individually, with no help. They jotted down their answer and closed their eyes to vote. I recorded the class results. Then students found someone with a different answer and tried to convince them to change their answer. After a few minutes, students re-voted. I shared the results of both votes and asked students to explain their reasoning. I made sure to include students who were convinced of the correct answer. I revealed the answer and had time for explanations and clarification. Once the session was over, I let students resume their work. Students were overwhelmingly enthusiastic about this change. We all craved for communal time. I'm ecstatic that the communal time was a research based approach that was still student-centered. It was the best of all worlds. 

Adjustments:

I expected a two year roll out of the flipped class; year one is flipped videos and associated guided notes and forms, explore flip apply, Moodle quizzes and asynchronous learning, while year two will be standards based grading, blogging and voice & choice. I'm starting to question whether I should institute voice & choice earlier. I have a student or two who have struggled with the Moodle quizzes, despite post quiz conferences and retaking them. Even though there are some real issues with learning the material, the lack of partial credit has been a real detriment here. Moving forward, I will have a paper version of the quiz to administer to a small number of students who struggle. In addition, I ought to institute voice & choice sooner for students to display learning in alternative ways. I've already opened things up a bit. I've asked some students to create their own problems and solve them to convince me of their understanding. Even though I've done this informally and on an as needed basis, it has worked nicely. I ought to build in these alternative opportunities more often and eventually, allow all students to choose from a menu of ways to demonstrate knowledge. 

The other change I'm thinking about instituting a year earlier than originally planned is an element of standards based grading. In a recent response to a my ongoing course feedback form, a student mentioned that all of the activities were unnecessary to understand the material. I, of course, agree; this is one of the main reasons that I planned to institute SBG next year. In the interim, I've decided to reach out to individual students and discuss making certain activities optional. I won't open things up for all students just yet until I've thought through effective accountability and grading systems. At the very least, I can tell students to complete as many or as few problem set questions that they need.