Students’ experiences with the use of a social annotation tool to improve learning in flipped classrooms

To support the development and dissemination of more activating educational practices, pilot studies were launched on the use of the social annotation tool Perusall. During 2016-2017 several managers of higher education course units worked with Perusall in classes of a size varying from 10 to more than hundred students. To assess the usefulness and effectiveness of Perusall we focused on two related aspects (1) perception by students of Perusall as an appropriate tool to support the processing of the study texts and (2) the impact of student engagement in Perusall on students’ examination results. Student experiences were evaluated by means of online questionnaires about several aspects concerning to the adoption of Perusall and log data about student activities in the Perusall platform.The results of the study show that engagement in deep level processing of course content depends on three critical factors: the transparency of annotation assignments, the perceived ease of working in Perusall and teachers’ use of students’ annotations to discuss the course content during lectures. The study further shows that students receive better examination results the more they engage in the annotation assignments.