By Leigh M. Harrell-Williams, Yeonji Jung, Eli Jones, Luke Walden
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Encouraging engagement and discussion in an online course can be challenging. Unlike traditional discussion boards, social annotation activities move student engagement with each other and course content a step forward as students read and comment directly on the relevant section of content in a shared space. This “Beyond” session will describe the development and implementation of article-based assignments within the Perusall platform in a fifteen-week graduate introductory statistics course with 14 students from College of Education and School of Health Sciences. Within each of the four assignments, students were asked to respond to three content-specific questions directly imbedded in the readings in Perusall. Additionally, students were asked to respond to a single item at the end of the readings indicating if and how the reading facilitated a different understanding of the content than the textbook readings and videos for that content. Students were instructed that they may build off of each others’ posts, but this was not required. Fourteen students completed these assignments as part of an asynchronous online section. Five students were in a section that met once a week in-person for three hours. In addition, several features in Perusall were used to inform instruction and/or instructor feedback.