What is Top Hat?
Top Hat is an engagement platform that empowers educators to incorporate active learning into every area of their course.
Instructors use Top Hat during class to drive discussions, take live polls, and give students real-time feedback on how well they understand course concepts. Outside of class, Top Hat enables instructors to adopt and personalize interactive content, assignments, and assessments.
Top Hat also offers services such as group training, individual consultation, and instructional design support to help faculty achieve their desired course outcomes.
No Additional Cost!
University of Central Arkansas has partnered with Top Hat to provide their engagement platform to our faculty, students, and staff at no additional cost to you. In courses where the instructor uses a Top Hat Textbook or other content for a fee, students will be asked to pay for access during the registration process.
Top Hat Features
Top Hat’s engagement platform has everything educators and institutions need to deliver interactive and personalized learning.
Student Response and Assessment
- Discussions: Foster collaboration, critical thinking, and community by posing questions and discussion prompts students can answer on any device. Learn how to spur lively conversations.
- Polls & Quizzes: Keep your students engaged with 14 question types, including click-on-target, word answer and multiple choice, and immediately see how they’re responding.
- Assignments & Exams: Make homework a learning experience with interactive assignments and multimedia. Our formative and summative assessments put students’ knowledge to the test.
- Automatic Attendance: Automate attendance in any in-person or online course and get instant insights to help at-risk students.
Personalizable Content
- Pages Content Editor: Create interactive, personalized content that reflects your students and community.
- Customizable Textbooks: Packed with interactive features and the ability to edit, Top Hat textbooks take dynamic learning to a new level.
- Interactive Labs: Adopt and personalize virtual lab manuals with interactive diagrams, animations, and video demos.
Educator Tools and Insights
- Real-Time Data: Top Hat creates actionable insights from attendance, quiz, poll, assignment and test data, so you can improve learning in the moment and over time.
- Accessibility: Our dynamic courseware is designed to meet or exceed internationally recognized accessibility standards and offers flexible options for individual students.
- LMS Integration: Top Hat seamlessly integrates with Blackboard for a better course experience.
View the potential of real-time data to support student success.
Top Hat Content Solutions
Learning experiences that give every student a voice. Whether you’re looking for authored textbooks complete with teaching resources, OpenStax content that’s interactive, a custom textbook or content that’s designed for your course, Top Hat has content solutions for you.
- Customize text or lab manuals for your course. Top Hat Textbooks are authored by experts in their field and produced by Top Hat’s editorial team. With robust teaching resources, they are easy to personalize for your course.
- OER, made dynamic. Adopt OpenStax content optimized for our dynamic courseware, then personalize it. Or Top Hat can help to optimize any OER material for your course (courses must meet criteria to qualify).
- The perfect textbook is the one you create. Top Hat Pages makes it easy to edit or create original, interactive, and personalized content that reflects your students. From the first draft to the final review, you’ll have our support.
Ready to use Top Hat?
UCA has installed a new integration between Top Hat and Blackboard, and it is ready for faculty to use for the upcoming term. This integration includes features to enhance your integrated course experience, including:
- Deep Linking: Allows instructors to create links from your Blackboard course to specific content in your Top Hat course, so it is clear to students which work they are expected to do.
- Automatic Roster Sync: Makes student enrollment simple and regularly syncs your Top Hat roster in sync with your Blackboard roster.
- Automatic Grade Sync: Grades sync from Top Hat to Blackboard so every student knows where they stand. Deep linked assignments automatically sync to the Blackboard grade book shortly after they are made available to students in Top Hat.
Follow these steps to use Top Hat in your course.
Already using Top Hat? Check out this sample text for your syllabi!
Resources and Professional Development
Top Hat offers toolkits, ebooks, webinars on teaching and learning topics, and product training on its site for free. Some of the most popular resources include:
- Top Hat Summer Camp
- Top Hat Guide to Intentional Course Design
- Top Hat Platform Training – online training series – register for live sessions or watch on-demand recorded training
- Sign up for Top Hat Innovative Educator Certification
- Creating a Top Hat Student Account
Perhaps the greatest resource available to faculty is the Top Hat Instructional Design Team. Schedule a one-on-one session with an instructional designer dedicated to supporting UCA faculty. Book a session!
