{"id":1525,"date":"2023-05-26T15:53:31","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T15:53:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/activelearning\/?p=1525"},"modified":"2023-05-26T16:02:12","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T16:02:12","slug":"collaborative-reading-before-a-flipped-class-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/activelearning\/2023\/05\/26\/collaborative-reading-before-a-flipped-class-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Collaborative reading before a flipped class"},"content":{"rendered":"

This case study is from Francisco (Paco) Rodr\u00edguez-Fortu\u00f1o<\/a>, Reader in Physics at King\u2019s College London<\/strong>. Paco teaches a core module on Electromagnetism to around 160 second year undergraduate Physics students. The format is flipped, which means that the session that used to be a lecture is now dedicated to resolving difficulties and misunderstandings with reading that students complete in advance.<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/a>What is it?<\/h2>\n

Perusall<\/a> is a platform developed at Harvard University to make students\u2019 reading collaborative. I heard about Perusall from Eric Mazur<\/a>, the Harvard physics professor, when he visited King\u2019s. With Perusall I divide students randomly into groups and they follow my instructions to leave comments on my notes, upvote and start discussions. I can set deadlines and students get reminders by email. Perusall can generate grades (I\u2019ll explain why this is important later). It also gives me charts of engagement data. It\u2019s free if you give students freely available material to read or watch.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m using it for flipping. I need students to have read the same set of detailed lecture notes before coming to class.<\/p>\n

<\/a>Why did you initiate this?<\/h2>\n

I needed to get the flipping right. Students were introduced to electromagnetism in Year 1, so what I didn\u2019t want to do is re-teach those concepts and risk losing the students who had already learned them. So, I wanted to improve their engagement and preparation to make sure they were coming to class with similar knowledge.\u00a0I also hoped they would help each other, because when I was studying and doing problem exercises, I was asking my friends all the time.<\/p>\n

The software made it easy to try this collaborative approach. An overarching feeling I have about Perusall is that you can tell it was made by lecturers. All the \u2018little things\u2019 that you need are there. I can easily give my teaching assistant the right level of access to the groups because there\u2019s a \u2018Mark as TA\u2019 setting. I can also set a page range of a document rather than the whole thing. \u00a0Commenting is easy \u2013 students highlight text or click on a specific part of a figure, and start typing. Students can type in LaTeX<\/a> maths notation as well as natural language, so they can comment using equations. I can easily see the comments in different ways, and I can draw students\u2019 attention to valuable comments in other groups. I can set the grading assignment by assignment or for the whole class, and I can make the criteria add up to more than 100% – that means there can be several different ways to get full marks. I can see the breakdown of each student\u2019s grade.<\/p>\n

<\/a>How is it set up?<\/h2>\n

In Perusall, I set up the course. That generates a unique access code which I pass to my students with a link. I did that in the first lecture, they registered, and they were in \u2013 they only have to do that once. For each assignment they are randomly allocated into groups of 20.<\/p>\n

Then each week I upload the lecture notes (a PDF document of around 15 pages) into the Perusall library \u2013 that\u2019s drag and drop and very easy. Then I create a Perusall assignment related to those notes, with instructions. Each student\u2019s engagement is graded, and Perusall does this automatically based on my parameters.<\/p>\n

\"Perusall<\/p>\n

The grading criteria Perusall uses are:<\/p>\n