Product Overview of Top Hat
Top Hat is a comprehensive educational software platform designed to enhance teaching and learning experiences in higher education. Founded in 2009 by Mike Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini, Top Hat aims to make education more engaging, affordable, and equitable.
What Top Hat Does
Top Hat is an end-to-end educational platform that helps teachers, professors, and educational institutions facilitate and enhance learning both inside and outside the classroom. It integrates various tools to create active classroom engagements, manage educational content, administer assignments and assessments, and track student performance in real-time.
Key Features and Functionality
Interactive Learning Environment
Top Hat enables educators to build an interactive learning environment where students can actively participate using their own devices. Students can engage in classroom discussions, vote on responses, and even respond with drawings, all while maintaining the option for anonymity.
Customizable Content and Assignments
Educators can create, customize, and personalize assignments, textbooks, and other learning materials. These can include graphical and interactive elements such as videos, images, website links, and question packages. Assignments can be delivered instantly to students’ devices and can be tailored to specific students or groups.
Assessments and Quizzes
Top Hat allows for the creation, administration, and grading of quizzes, tests, and exams. The platform automates the grading process and uses proprietary algorithms to detect and prevent cheating. Test scores are automatically uploaded to the software’s grade book, making it easy to monitor student performance.
Classroom Management
The platform includes tools for automating classroom management processes such as attendance checking. It also provides real-time data and analytics to help educators identify struggling students and difficult concepts.
Student Response & Assessment
Top Hat offers a range of tools for student response and assessment, including discussions, polls, quizzes, assignments, and exams. These tools support multiple question types and provide immediate feedback to both educators and students.
Community and Collaboration
Top Hat’s “Community” feature provides digital spaces for students and educators to communicate, collaborate, and build connections. This includes real-time discussions, project collaborations via chat or video conferencing, and the ability to share class news and updates. Community moderation tools ensure safe and organic conversations.
Integration and Accessibility
Top Hat integrates with Learning Management Systems (LMS) like Canvas, minimizing the number of accounts and technologies users need to manage. The platform also supports accessibility features and offers detailed student performance reports and real-time analytics.
Support and Training
Top Hat provides extensive support through live chat, phone, and email, as well as a comprehensive support center and knowledge base. Additionally, it offers self-guided and instructor-led training sessions to help educators get the most out of the platform.
Additional Benefits
- Discounted Textbooks: Top Hat offers textbooks at discounted rates for students, further enhancing the affordability of education.
- Real-Time Insights: The platform generates actionable insights from attendance, quiz, poll, assignment, and test data, helping educators improve learning in real-time and over time.
- STEM Support: Top Hat includes tools like KaTeX for expressing equations in the correct format, making it particularly useful for STEM courses.
In summary, Top Hat is a robust educational platform that empowers educators to create engaging, interactive, and personalized learning experiences, while also providing robust tools for classroom management, assessment, and student engagement.