Top Hat is a higher education app designed to make teaching fun and effective. It leverages learners’ devices to take attendance, launch discussions and questions, and get real-time feedback inside the classroom and out. Built for educators in higher education, professors and teaching faculty can leverage Top Hat to increase learner engagement, assign homework, and more.

Website: https://tophat.com/

What Users Love About the App

“As a student, I found it helpful that you could return at a later time and access course materials like PowerPoints, Review questions and videos. All the information was in one one location.”

“I like a lot of features of Tophat! The slideshow sharing, and the ability for students to join the course with an access code makes it very easy for them to access the course. All the slideshows can be saved in Assigned material. Grading is very easy through Tophat, and I really like the geo-location feature in marking the attendance.”

“The layout of Top Hat is very straightforward, and really works well in large lecture settings in order to further engage the class and check in with everyone so that they’re all on the same page. It’s also very simple, which is perfect for making sure students can answer questions quickly within a lecture.”

“I LOVE the fact that you can customize and more affordable and interactive textbook for the classes you are taking. We all know that textbook prices aren’t cheap and can definitely add up so it’s really awesome that Top Hat offers the ability to actually afford a textbook that you can CUSTOMIZE to your needs,. Also from what I’ve heard from one of my professors is that it is easy to create Homework assignments through Top Hat as well.”

“I liked being able to answer questions in my college courses from the tap of my phone and was able to go back through the questions to review before tests. It was also nice being able to check- in for attendance through this application.”

What Users Dislike About the App

“Like any software there were glitches and we had to resort back to the old fashion PowerPoint. And then it took 10 minutes for rhe videos to load online.”

“Always changing/developing/updating, which is good, but not very helpful to me as a member of the support team for our institution. Makes it difficult to keep up with training/self-help materials and tracking known issues/bugs. For Top Hat itself to keep up, too, since their published documentation is sometimes behind.”

“There is a lot of lag sometimes while trying to access the time constrained attendance marker. I have also had issues with its layout for the web version – that’s not very user friendly.”

“I feel like the mobile site / app integration could be more smooth, and it was frustrating having to log in through the institutional log-in every time rather than being able to log in and stay logged in to the Top Hat site (although that might’ve been more due to my institution’s policies than Top Hat itself).”

“This software allowed me to connect with other students and allowed for immediate knowledge check. It was real time and easy to use. The app is accessible through mulitiple devices and worked great as an app on my Android phone and through my web browser on my tablet.”