So I've just shared why I love classroom discussions, but we're in an online course, we're not getting together in the same classroom, more of it's an asynchronous course, we may not all be working on it at the exact same time. So the way we're going to, not replicate, we're going to modify this and differentiate it for us in our particular circumstances, is we're going to use an online tool called, Perusall. If you've taken a class with me before you can skip to the end of this video, because I'm just going to kind of explain how Perusall works. So what Perusall is, is it's an online shared space where I will be uploading some documents. These will be my classroom discussion multiple choice questions, and you can highlight and write analyses, you can highlight and evaluate things. You can read what other people have said about particular things, and you can, in our case we're looking to use this to deepen your understanding of the analyses of why certain answers are right or wrong. You can also use this to support reading of textbooks or of articles, and allow people to ask questions about them or make comments about how they think about it. So what you're going to see, is you're going to see a series of slides, that will be on there in this phase, with a question on there, some code, and four multiple choice options. You will not be, well, you're not formally voting. What I'm going to ask you to do, is to highlight the option that you think is right and write an explanation, it sort of shows up like a comment on a Word doc or a Google doc on the side, of why you think that answer is right. So what does the analysis you'd want students to give about, or if you were to go to students about why this is the right answer, and then I'd like you to pick one of the other wrong answers and write an analysis of why the others are wrong. So I don't think Perusall has this, something where I can make you comment before you can see other people's, but I know they're working on it, so just in case, that might happen at some point. But one of the things that's great about this is, you can see how your analysis is compared to other people. Do they use words that you like that you want to use? In this way, also, you can read about the other two wrong answers that maybe you didn't choose to write about. So this is something that we'll call collaborative knowledge construction in your classes classroom discussions, but really this is about you, all together, collaboratively constructing your knowledge. And there will be instructions on the first slide that tell you how many things that are to do, and it will tell you how many things you need to comment on. Sometimes we put that in a comment, so here's what it's going to look like. This is not mine, this is a physics textbook, just give you an idea, and it was developed by the physics people, because apparently nobody can read and understand a physics textbook, which may very well be true. So you can see over here on the left that it's got the text there, yellow are other students highlighting and the purple is where I just highlighted, and it shows me then any of the threads or comments about this. It's like, I couldn't agree more, I'm auditing a first-year calculus-based college course blah blah blah, and so it's some things where people are actually engaging in discussion around the topic. Okay, that's important to understand that they want this effortful discussion-based thing, because it's automatically created with a machine learning algorithm. And they're looking for effortful responses, you'll have a chance to figure out what that really means. Yours is going to look like this, okay? You'll be on Perusall, it's going to pop you out to another tab out of Coursera, you'll get the slide. And then over here, I want to point out, up here on the top, sometimes I'll have images on my slides. You can't highlight images normally in the text mode, text mode is the A to the left of that box. If you want images click on that, if you want to see what everybody has said you can click on these double word bubbles and that will pop open all the threads. And, yes, to encourage you to do a good job, you will get points for doing this. I think you'll also find this valuable, and so I want you to know that Perusall will automatically be evaluating your comments, I will not be. What you also need to know, is that Perusall doesn't immediately send the results out, to keep kids from gaming the system, and also for systems performance issues, but in fact, it will every 60 minutes, or so, the grade will be released. So if you want to see, did my comment get full points, you are welcome to come back and look at it, and if you want, comment some more or modify your comment, to see if it gets better points. I'll just tell you now how I'm going to do the rating, it's not really critical, okay? If you have a very extensive comment, it's probably going to give you a rating of 2, it's always a zero one or two. I am going to take those numbers and assign them a grade as such, if you get a zero you're going to get a low percent, zeros are something like, hey, that's cool, okay? Don't put that, one is maybe not as thorough as they were looking for, I think they grade pretty harshly, so I'm going to give that a 90%, and a two gets a 100%. So effortfully engage, and you shouldn't have to worry about coming back and redoing Perusall comments just to get a better grade, if that's what you want. You are welcome to come back, and read things other people might have answered, I think you'll find that more interesting. But there you are, again, we have this because it's a carrot, I could assign you things to read and whatever, but I probably wouldn't be able to gather it. And I think this is a great way to support collaboration amongst your students as well, so I like to show you that often. And I would like you guys to be collaborating together, to further improve your student achievement.
