This release introduces a fresh, modern UI for Perusall that simplifies and streamlines workflows for both instructors creating and managing courses and students engaging with course content and each other:

Perusall now offers a reimagined system for creating and managing groups that is both more straightforward and more powerful, and reduces the opportunity for unintentionally setting up groups in a way that was not desired.

When setting up your course, you can select from four grouping modes:

Group sets can be created within Perusall (either manually or by randomizing), imported from a spreadsheet, or imported directly from your LMS (Canvas, Blackboard, or D2L/Brightspace). You can choose a default group set to be applied when you haven't selected one explicitly for a particular document or assignment, and you can also explicitly choose the behavior that will govern what happens when a new student enrolls in your course.

No action is needed for existing courses: courses that previously used the default "Allow Perusall to automatically assign students to groups" option will be migrated to content-based grouping; courses that used the "Specify groups" option will be migrated to fixed groups. When you create a new course, you'll be able to select from any of the four options -- or you can change your grouping mode at any time.

For instructors that want to create a more structured experience for students, you can now create a "gated" assignment: a multipart assignment that consists of both content and one or more quizzes. In a gated assignment, students must complete all of the questions in each quiz before moving on to the next part of the assignment. Set an assignment as gated in the Options tab when creating or editing an assignment.

Perusall's automatic scoring now supports student comments written in Italian (in addition to English, Spanish, Dutch, and French). If you teach a course in one of these languages and use Perusall's automatic scoring of comment quality, select your course language in Settings > General to activate a scoring algorithm tuned to that language.

Two new assignment types add more flexibility for assignments based on students' uploaded material.

are peer review assignments where some students are tasked with uploading materials (but are not required to review other students' submissions) and the rest of the class reviews those materials. As in peer review assignments, the original submitters then return to respond to the comments left on their work. Learn more about fishbowl assignments

allow students to upload their work to be reviewed (and optionally scored) by instructors or TAs. Instructors use a rubric to score the submission and leave in-text comments, which the original author can be required to respond to afterwards. Learn more about fishbowl assignments

You can now set granular permissions for your teaching assistants based on your policy and preferences about what TAs should and shouldn't be able to do in your course: review grades, assign grades, edit the course, etc. Set and change these settings in :

Since introducing peer review last fall, we've made a number of improvements to make it more flexible and usable for students:

You can now create reusable scoring templates and rubrics to easily manage settings that are common across assignments. For example, you might want to maintain one set of scoring settings for your video assignments and another for readings from your textbook -- now you can simply create a single scoring template for each and apply that template to each assignment, rather than having to manually re-enter scoring settings for each assignment. (And if you want to make a change to a scoring setting, simply make it in one place and it will automatically apply to all related assignments!) You can create scoring templates when creating assignments, and manage scoring templates in . Learn more about scoring templates

Similarly, you can create rubrics (or import them from your LMS) and apply those rubrics to multiple assignments. Simply select from among your course rubrics when creating an assignment, instead of having to duplicate assignments to get the same rubric to apply to multiple assignments! You can create rubrics when creating review-based assignments, and manage rubrics in . Learn more about rubrics

You can now facilitate peer review using the new peer review assignment type. Students submit work, are automatically (or manually) assigned to review each others' submissions (providing comments and optionally scoring based on an instructor-provided rubric), and have the opportunity to respond to peer feedback. Perusall's automated grading allows you to conduct peer review even at scale in large courses.

You can now easily assign different content to different students without creating multiple assignments, allowing you to more easily manage differentiated work and sync back all student work to a single column in your LMS gradebook. Differentiated assignments also bypass your course grouping settings to ensure that students assigned the same content will be able to engage directly with each other.

When writing a comment, you can now link directly to content in your course library, in addition to linking out to an external site:

If you have quizzes in a spreadsheet format, you can now easily import them into your Library:

Access the new import feature under . You can still import quizzes in QTI format exported from LMSs via .

Visit perusall.com to explore our latest features, upcoming events, and educational resources for instructors and students.