The VU license for Perusall will expire on 31 August 2026. For more information and migration support, please go to Phasing out Perusall at VU Amsterdam.

Want to know more about how Perusall and FeedbackFruits Interactive Document stimulate reading? Read our previous tip for our recommendations! 

1: FeedbackFruits - teacher driven / Perusall - student driven 
FeedbackFruits and Perusall differ in their approach to engage with students. FeedbackFruits is recommended to be more teacher-driven, meaning that teachers guide students more on their thinking direction. You can create question cards and open discussion threads with a leading question, that students build on. Perusall is recommended as a more student-driven tool, meaning it is designed to have minimal guidance from you as a teacher. Students can annotate literature and figures, and build on fellow classmates’ annotations without your participation.

2: FeedbackFruits - manual grading / Perusall - automatic grading
The grades on both platforms are automatically and directly synced with Canvas. FeedbackFruits does require manual grading where you assess the quality of a student’s work and award them with a grade. Furthermore, students can highlight their best annotations and reflect on the assignment. In Perusall, there is an additional option to use an auto-scoring feature, in which grading can be done with AI where you can input how important each criterion is beforehand. Students are also able to comment on the AI-generated feedback they have received.

3: Both offer good insights into students’ engagement
FeedbackFruits allows you to see exactly which students opened the assignment or literature, how many annotations they have written and how spread out the annotations of each student are. Perusall also shows these analytics and in addition gives insights into how much time students spent on each article and on which specific pages.

4: FeedbackFruits - takes time to set up an assignment / Perusall - faster to set up
The amount time required for setting up assignments is higher in FeedbackFruits because you need more time to fill in multiple-choice and open-ended questions. However, FeedbackFruits is a more intuitive tool, so you do not have to spend that much time getting familiar with the tool compared to Perusall. 

5: FeedbackFruits and Perusall are comparable in analyzing student contributions
To analyze student contributions, FeedbackFruits offers the possibility to organize annotations by group, location in the document, most positive reviews (upvotes), most recent and most reactions. This may take quite some time. Perusall on the other hand, has the option of creating a ‘confusion report’ which shows you exactly what the most common problems amongst students were and what needs more explanation. This confusion report focuses on the topics identified as most relevant, the keywords for each topic and their respective passages from the assignment. The downside is that these confusion reports are not always accurate. Furthermore, in Perusall, it is also possible to sort annotations by group, student, annotation type (question or comment), unanswered questions and unread comments.

6: FeedbackFruits and Perusall comparably integrated in Canvas
Both tools are integrated in Canvas. However, Perusalll operates from its own website while FeedbackFruits operates within Canvas. This has some consequences, especially for group-syncing. In FeedbackFruits, groups are automatically synced with the groups created in Canvas. However, in Perusall, a group in Canvas might appear as another group number in Perusall. This can lead to confusion, so we recommend double-checking the group numbers when group-syncing with Perusall.

Bonus tip: quick group creation
The optimal group size for an online shared reading task is about 7 people. But how do you quickly create such a group and find it in Persuall or FeedbackFruits? This can be done as follows. First, often the normal groups will be available in Canvas Sections through course registration. Then create a Group set by letting Canvas create its own Group set (with the desired amount of students in it) where the students are drawn from the same Section (via Require group members to be in the same section). So then you create subgroups in groups (Sections). You can then link these subgroups to the assignment directly in FeedbackFruits or Perusall.