Social annotation is a collaborative learning activity that asks students to read, respond, and build on each other's thinking directly within a shared text. Research consistently shows that social annotation improves comprehension, builds disciplinary reading habits, and creates the kind of accountability that solitary reading rarely does. There are several platforms for social annotation, such as Perusall, Hypothesis and Leganto.
Many Temple faculty members have used Perusall in the past because of the $0 fee option. Beginning July 6, 2026, there will no longer be a $0 Student Access Fee option available for Perusall for instructors at unlicensed institutions, including Temple. Instead, instructors who set up a free materials-only course will now be required by Perusall to select a student platform fee. Perusall also specifies the following fee waiver options:
- I'm using Perusall with my students for the first time
- I'm testing or demoing Perusall
- My institution does not allow students to pay for courseware
- I missed my institution's deadline for assigning a fee, but I will add it next term
- I'm interested in assigning a fee, but my bookstore doesn't work with Perusall
- I’m teaching a high school course
If you choose to work with Perusall for your courses moving forward, please request access to the Canvas external tool via a TU HelpTicket.
Perusall has informed Temple that if a faculty member selects a fee waiver option that does not reflect the reality of their situation (for example, selecting “I’m using Prerusall with my students for the first time” and it is not the first semester of usage), the faculty member’s Perusall account will be locked.
If you have individual students who face financial hardship, Perusall does allow you to exempt specific students from any platform fee, regardless of the option selected.
Instructors who adopt an ebook from the Perusall catalog will not be prompted to select an access fee. These changes affect only new courses created on or after July 6, 2026; courses already underway before that date will not be impacted.
Free Alternatives for Social Annotation
If you would prefer to avoid navigating Perusall's new fee structure, or if you are looking for an alternative, the following tools are available to Temple faculty and students at no additional cost.
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Leganto: Temple Libraries’s course resource management tool supports student annotation of assigned readings, via PDF uploads, and students can view one another's annotations. This is probably the closest institutional equivalent to Perusall's core function, though it does not integrate with Canvas gradebook.
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VoiceThread: Temple has an institutional license. VoiceThread supports multimedia commenting on documents, images, and video, and can be used for annotation-style engagement, particularly with visual or multimodal texts.
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Google Docs: Students can comment on shared documents and respond to one another's comments in real time. Straightforward and familiar for most students.
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Microsoft Word (with tracked comments): Works well for structured annotation tasks, particularly for longer or more formal texts. Shared commenting is possible through OneDrive/SharePoint.
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Adobe Acrobat: Supports commenting and annotation on PDFs, useful for scholarly articles or course packets.
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Visio: Supports commenting on images and text; best suited to visual or diagram-based annotation tasks.
A significant limitation of most of these alternatives is the absence of integration with the Canvas Gradebook (VoiceThread is the exception), which means engagement tracking and entering grades requires manual management on the part of the instructor. Tools such as Perusall and Hypothesis also have features such as creating sub-groups within a class, auto-grading of submissions and academic integrity tools that these other options do not feature. Perusall and Hypothesis, unlike Leganto, allow social annotation for a large variety of material types but Leganto limits social annotation to uploaded PDF’s only.
We recognize this is a frustrating situation, and we appreciate your patience as we work toward a more sustainable solution. If you have questions about any of these tools or want to talk through options for your specific course, please don't hesitate to reach out.