-: A bunch of folks here now, Jen,
do you think it's a good time to get started?
-: Let's do it.
-: All right, and, Justin,
I see that you already started the recording.
Thank you.
We are recording these sessions,
just so colleagues who can't join us during the live event
will be able to view the recording after the fact,
and they will be available on our website.
So just wanna make you aware of that,
and that we are doing the recording.
I wanna welcome you all here.
Thank you so much for being here today.
I'm Holly Buckland Parker
from the Center for Teaching and Learning, and my,
so we are part of a student response system committee
that is reviewing different software, hardware
that actually allows students to do responses
during live classes.
And today's vendor is the Top Hat software and hardware.
And actually you don't have hardware.
You just have software.
-: We use the devices they already own, Holly,
but thanks for sharing that, so I could slip that in there.
-: Students have the hardware already.
-: And I just wanted to give Jen a brief moment
to introduce herself as the co-chair of our committee
with me.
-: Yes, hi, everybody.
Jen Garrett-Ostermiller
from the Center for Teaching and Learning.
Happy to have you all here and to watch this demo.
-: Thanks, Jen.
And I'm going to turn things over to the folks at Top Hat.
They have a demo prepared for us.
They will be sharing their screen.
Chat will be available.
We're going to have 20 or so minutes,
is that right, Francis,
of kind of a presentation,
and then we'll have the question and answer?
-: Yep, that sounds good, Holly.
We'll try to get through it within 20 minutes.
-: Okay, so if you could hold any verbal questions
till we have that break that would be helpful.
But Cole did tell us that he would be monitoring the chat
along with myself and Jen and other folks on the committee.
So we can also try to answer some questions
as things are rolling right along.
And I'm gonna turn things over to Francis, Cole, and David.
-: Thank you.
-: And I will say just as, sorry, Francis,
as the guy working the chat.
We have a Q&A time at the end,
but I'd suggest if you've got any burning questions
that are gonna maybe distract you from the presentation
'cause you just gotta know, shoot 'em in the chat,
and I should be able to address them.
-: Thank you so much, Cole.
And thank you, Holly, for allowing me to practice
how to share my screen on Microsoft Teams.
I'm gonna go ahead and flex my new skills here,
and hopefully you're able to see
a slide that says "Active learning anywhere."
Cole, can you give me a thumbs up if you can see that?
-: Two thumbs up.
-: Beautiful, (Francis laughing) thank you.
All right, so the theme here is active learning anywhere.
The reason why we're emphasizing this is
right now, over the last year,
learning has been taking place
in all sorts of different environments,
whether it be remote, face-to-face, hybrid,
and Top Hat really is a solution
to make active learning easy
regardless of where the faculty and the student are.
So that's something we wanna highlight
since that has really come to the top sort of
of faculty needs lately.
But quickly, just a quick introduction.
So Cole is our Institutional Partnerships Director.
David and I
are the Senior Educational Technology Consultants
working directly with faculty, boots on the ground,
or at least when we were able to travel to Vermont,
which I really miss.
We were actually working directly with faculty there.
So the learning objective of today's demo
is really to walk away with a meaningful preview
of what makes Top Hat sort of the best option for UVM.
And Cole, I'll let you walk through
some of the key takeaways for everybody here.
Oh, you're on mute, Cole.
-: So thanks, Francis.
I think it's important
before we jump into a broad demonstration
that we just give you a couple things to focus on.
And the three main key takeaways
I'd like you to focus on, well, the first is
that Top Hat is the best and most robust polling solution
as well as being the easiest to use.
Number two, our one-on-one instructional design support
which every professor who uses Top Hat will get,
and our concierge team who will do all the work
that you don't wanna do when transitioning tools
like converting questions, building questions into Top Hat,
they'll do that for you.
These two teams will help you transition
from another tool painlessly.
Finally, Top Hat integrates seamlessly with Blackboard,
but we're not just gonna integrate the tool,
set up grade and roster sync and leave it at that.
We show our partners and their faculty
how to use Top Hat within these tools.
So we'll show you how to use Top Hat within Blackboard,
with Blackboard, from Blackboard.
Thank you, Francis.
-: And thank you, Cole.
All right, so for today's agenda,
we'll quickly go through what is Top Hat?
We'll actually get right into it,
build and run a lecture, so you can get a very concrete look
at what it is to make something within Top Hat
and just how easy it is,
which is really what we're trying to drive home
is Top Hat's intuitiveness.
And then of course, our setup and our support
which we feel is part of our secret sauce,
what makes Top Hat really unique,
what helps really for faculty
to make the most of the technology.
And then hopefully if I talk fast enough,
we'll have enough time for a Question and Answer period
at the end there.
So what exactly is Top Hat?
That's something that a lot of faculty
scratch their heads and ask.
We're essentially an app
that allows you to assess students anywhere at any time.
So we are speaking the language of today's students.
They love apps.
They love their phones,
so we've optimized an app for their cell phone.
However, we're also browser optimized.
So regardless of the device you're using,
you can even use your flip phone.
Anything that you've got with you, next to you,
you can use to interact with Top Hat,
really making learning accessible
and leveraging the devices
that are already in the classroom
rather than introducing new devices.
But let's take a quick step back for a moment.
Before we jump into all the nitty gritty
of how to use Top Hat,
I wanna quickly give you a fun fact about the platform.
13 years ago, in 2008 at the University of Waterloo,
two computer engineering students were sitting
in a classroom, and they said to each other,
their names were Mike and Mohsen,
now, you know, not surprisingly, the co-founders of Top Hat,
said to themselves, we are very much passive participants
in this massive lecture.
We feel like the lecture can be better.
They conceived this idea of what if, you know,
at the time smartphones were becoming a very popular item
in somebody's pocket, they said,
well, what if we took these smartphones,
instead of these, you know, remote controls
that students have to bring to class,
what if we leveraged those devices we already have
to actually immerse ourselves in the lecture
and create an active learning experience.
Fun fact number two, the very first Top Hat customer
was the professor of our co-founder.
They asked him if he could try it in class.
So in a nutshell, Top Hat was actually developed
by students, for students.
Let's fast forward to what the classroom looks like in 2021.
Many of you may be familiar with what I like to call
Blackbox fatigue.
You're staring at a bunch of black boxes,
and the reason the fatigue comes is because as an educator,
you just don't know.
Are they with me?
Are they listening?
Are they learning?
Maybe this person is making a sandwich?
This person might have gone over to Trader Joe's.
which I'm a huge fan of personally,
one of the key things I miss about being in Vermont.
So really, the need for connection
and the new for engagement has never been
stronger or higher.
So with that, let's jump right into it.
Oh, before that, one thing I really wanna highlight
as a summary, active learning on any device,
in any environment, but we know that because faculty come
from all different technological backgrounds,
it has to be simple and it has to be easy.
So let's show you exactly what I mean by that.
Let's go ahead and make some stuff.
So I'm gonna switch over to my Top Hat application.
So you should be able to see two,
a web browser and an iPhone simulator on my screen.
Cole, thumbs up?
Two thumbs up, awesome.
Holly: Yes you can.
-: Just one this time?
Okay, now two.
Thank you.
So I'm gonna go ahead.
I'm on the Top Hat website.
I'm gonna click log in,
and this is immediately gonna take me
to my professor homepage.
So in my course homepage,
I can select the course that I'm gonna use.
You know, many of you teach different courses.
So today's course happens to be called UVM demo.
What a coincidence.
So I'm gonna go in there, click that.
And then the student view is gonna be on the right side.
Again, students can use any device that they own,
that they love.
In this case, we're just gonna be using an iPhone 11.
And so this is my course homepage.
I already had a folder created.
We'll get to that later.
Let's actually start from scratch.
Let's say that I'm a professor.
I wanna implement active learning.
I wanna use Top Hat.
Let me show you from beginning to end
how that's gonna be done.
So one of the differentiators of Top Hat
is that you can actually upload your slides
into the platform, so that you're not toggling
between your clicker tool, your response system
and your slides. It's kind of all in one.
So I'm gonna click the create button,
and that you'll notice,
one thing that I want to emphasize here
is just how clean and simple the interface is.
There's only one button here.
Create, upload your slides.
You don't have to upload your slides.
Many faculty who use Top Hat are just chalk and talk,
and they use it for the questions,
but many faculty actually
wanna make their slides interactive.
So I'm gonna upload some slides here.
Those are gonna start uploading directly into Top Hat.
And we also have a partnership with Microsoft PowerPoint,
so yes you can, after uploading these slides,
you can edit them within Top Hat as well
to make those last minute changes before your lecture.
While my slides are uploading,
I'm gonna go ahead and start adding some questions.
Again, keeping things simple.
I'm gonna go back to the create button.
I'm gonna click the question button.
Another differentiator of Top Hat,
active learning is oftentimes defined
by how can we easily make students think
at a higher cognitive level?
That goes beyond multiple choice, beyond word answer.
We wanna empower faculty
with so many different question types
so that regardless of what you're teaching,
whether it be engineering, physics, food science,
regardless of what it is, there is a question type
that can challenge your students, right?
So you'll notice here many, many question types.
On the left we have our basic auto-graded,
all are auto-graded except for the long answer.
And then on the right side,
we have more complex question types: tables and graphs,
math response, graph response,
chemistry response which some faculty
in the chemistry department have used,
where students can actually draw chemical diagrams,
video assignment that allows students to record themselves.
This is common in a public speaking course, for example,
where students record themselves doing a speech.
The name of the game here is simplicity and variety,
a lot to pick and choose from.
So let's go ahead and just start with a basic word answer.
Now I'm gonna give my question a title.
So I'm just gonna say question one,
and I'm gonna say, ah, it's gonna be
a bit of a controversial question.
What is the best place to eat in Burlington?
Now I don't mean to throw my opinions on people,
but I'm gonna go ahead
and say that the correct response here is Gaku Ramen.
Some of you may agree, some of you may disagree,
but this is my class, and so this is the correct,
this is the correct answer.
So what you can automatically do here is gamify the lecture.
And what I mean by that is,
correctness and participation points
that are being automatically tracked.
Your students can track them.
You don't have to worry about tracking participation at all.
You can change the weightings of these
if you wanna incentivize students in different ways.
Why don't we make it even more like a game show?
Add a timer, 60 seconds, make it a group question.
This really is yours to kind of play with,
but if you don't wanna get into the complex things,
you're short on time, just click save, and you're done.
Your question has been created.
Okay, and when we go to our slides,
we can just drag and drop it after slide number one.
Okay?
Let's say that I wanna add another question
to slide number three.
I just click on slide three.
I go to create, back to question, and let's say in this case
I wanna choose a click on target.
So I'm gonna do that.
Call this question two.
Click on, ah, let's see.
We can upload an image.
So this is very common in geography, biology.
So I'm gonna decide to choose,
let's say the heart image here
that I just kind of took from Google.
I'm gonna ask students to select the aorta.
Now I know Laura's on the call right now.
Laura, I'm probably gonna get this wrong.
I know you're an AMP professor,
so I'm just gonna choose this and hope this is right.
So I can select my correct response,
and then I can actually choose multiple correct answers
just by clicking on this image.
All the while you can easily just preview
what it's gonna look like for the student, right?
And the students will see how many targets
they can actually place.
I click save.
That's done.
This is gonna be auto-graded.
Again, all of those points are being fed
to your Top Hat grade book.
Now another question type that's very, very popular
that really helps, especially those shy students
or students who don't, are not likely to participate
in discussion is our discussion tool.
So let's say I wanna finish the lecture
by just asking my students, you know,
what questions they have?
Or what was the muddiest point of today's lecture?
Now with this tool, I can actually set it to be anonymous,
so that students can't read each other's responses
within the settings.
That means that as responses come in in real time
this turns into kind of a live feedback board.
If it's anonymous,
then you won't be able to see students' names.
And that can be very useful if you're touching upon,
let's say asking students to identify a weakness,
something they found difficult in class,
making it anonymous can be very, very powerful.
So I'm gonna call this end of class discussion.
Now because we recommend, you know,
one question about every 15 minutes,
the average lecture if it's an hour,
will only have about four questions.
That's something
that our instructional designers teach faculty.
If they need that, if they need those, need to learn how to,
like the frequency of adding questions,
we do recommend, you know, three to four per hour
to keep the lecture going.
So that essentially is building out a lecture in Top Hat,
and a couple of--
-: Hey, Francis?
-: Yep?
-: Can you do me a favor?
Could you go to question two, edit it,
and just maybe add the number of attempts per student,
increase it to 20 because I'd like the team
to see what it looks like when 20 students or more
are interacting with a click on target question.
And I will be those 20 students on my phone.
-: Sounds good.
So you can always give students different attempts here.
So I'm gonna select 20, very generous professor here.
All right.
So that from start to finish is building a lecture
and making it interactive.
So most people would find that really easy to do.
And so what I'm gonna do now is go ahead
and present the lecture.
So on the bottom, sorry on the top right,
you see the present button,
just go ahead and click that.
You can actually take attendance.
So this is one way to actually motivate attendance
or if faculty are tracking attendance manually,
that can save them a lot of time.
So I can click the take attendance button.
A unique code will appear every time
so that students can't cheat the system.
And so I'm gonna go into my Top Hat app.
You'll notice on the right side, the attendance has come up.
I input the code.
So I'm gonna input 3782.
And we also have secure attendance.
So you can have a GPS, it kind of creates a geo-fence
around your classroom
so that students physically have to be in the class
to mark themselves present.
And if you're not using geo-fencing attendance
then you can actually have students mark themselves present
from wherever they are.
So that will be useful in your hybrid style courses.
So once you press start presentation,
you'll be into, you'll be in your slides now.
And you can skip ahead to other slides that you have
or you can just go through your slide show
by clicking the next arrow on your keyboard.
So what is the best place to eat in Burlington?
I can go ahead, start the question.
So notice how it's directly embedded in my slides.
So I never have to kind of leave or go anywhere.
You'll notice that the timer is activated on the top right?
And so as a student, I can actually participate.
Let me just use my iPhone here.
And you'll notice at the bottom,
you can actually track how many students
are actually participating.
So do, do, do, gig.
There we go.
Perfect. And thank you, Cole for responding as well.
So on the bottom, I can go ahead,
show the responses to my class,
highlight the correct response.
All of this data is then immediately sent
into my grade book.
Cole, you look really happy.
-: I couldn't remember the Gaku part,
but I know the ramen place.
-: Yeah, there we go.
The ramen place.
And of course, here you can go ahead
and show your word cloud,
which is a really fun way to demonstrate student results.
Now, moving forward, we're back in our slide show.
So our slides are presenting.
And then again, this seamless experience
where our slides go uninterrupted with our questions.
Select the aorta.
All right, let's do this, probably--
-: Give me a moment for all 20 question.
All 20 students in this class to respond.
I'm on it.
We're at we're at about four or five and counting.
A couple of these students are way off.
And in fact, I'm not even sure if that's the correct answer.
We just guessed, so.
-: All right, Cole.
I'm gonna click add 60 second timer
because I'm, oh, there you go.
-: I got it right in there.
-: I was running out of time there,
so I had to put the timer on.
So let's see the responses.
All right, so let's see the responses.
Okay, so Laura's probably shaking her head right now.
This does not look good.
I don't think we did really well,
but oh, but we did get, you know,
one of your attempts was in the correct area.
And one of my attempts was.
I kind of just clicked everywhere. So good job.
-: Nice.
-: Most instructors would not give 20 attempts, however, so.
You got lucky this time, Cole.
All right.
So finally, let's go over to our discussion question.
So what was the muddiest point of today's lecture?
I can go ahead and just say the,
I can type something in here,
and then you'll notice that these are anonymous.
So these will start coming in.
Sounds like Cole is typing something.
-: Oh, sorry.
I'll mute myself. I was answering a question in the chat.
-: Oh, gotcha.
Oh, I thought you were submitting something
into the discussion board.
So what students can do is they can actually,
like Facebook, they can like each other's responses.
So I can click this like button and actually up votes.
We've got "Huh?" here.
I can comment on other student's responses,
and you can actually sort these responses by the most liked.
-: Francis, do you think I can maybe tell a quick story here?
-: Yes, of course.
-: So anybody who's watching
who teaches more than a hundred students
may be imagining to themselves, like how is it possible
that I'm gonna get a hundred responses in real time
and be able to work with that data?
How is that possible?
The answer is maybe Francis was just getting to this,
but I've got a good story to add,
in the top right, When he selects most liked,
it orders the 100 responses
by the responses that your students have liked the most.
So you really only have to respond
to the top one or two questions.
You ask the question, ask students to read through them
and like the ones that resonate with them.
And you'll be able to have a conversation
with the whole class,
just by responding to one or two questions.
This has proven so effective that it's become the essential,
an essential piece to the largest human sexuality course
in Canada, taught at Dalhousie University
to a 450 student lecture for the past five years,
where he is able to get students to anonymously share
stories and facts or their opinions
on things that they normally
would absolutely never speak about in a classroom.
I certainly wouldn't.
So when used effectively,
this tool can completely change the way students feel
about sharing information in class
and open up discussions that were otherwise
completely impossible.
Sorry about that, Francis. I think you were getting to that,
but I had to tell my Dalhousie story.
-: Nobody tells a story like you, Cole,
so no, that was wonderful.
So what I can do now at the end of my lecture
is I can click on my slides, click on the responses.
Do you see this assign button in the corner?
I can assign them so that students can actually review
the slides and the responses to the questions
on their phone, on their device, wherever they want.
Now they can review all of that.
That's another differentiator of Top Hat.
Let's throw in another differentiator of Top Hat.
You can actually,
we didn't leave the asynchronous lectures out.
We know that there are many many more asynchronous courses
now after the remote, you know, era of education.
So you can easily turn this lecture
into an asynchronous lecture
using what we call a Top Hat page.
And so I just went ahead and created a sample
of what that can look like.
So within Top Hat, I just typed in lecture to the brain
into a blank Top Hat page.
I had a discussion question where I'm asking my students,
you know, what's one thing you'd like to learn
about the brain?
This is the same discussion question you just saw,
but in an asynchronous format.
It works just the same.
In an assignment, you can actually have that.
So you notice one student has some, you know,
wants to learn about phantom limb pain.
The other wants to learn
why does my brain like chips but not carrots?
So as I go through
you actually have your lecture videos and then questions.
So you can track, have that same interactivity,
break up your video, your lecture video,
and then more interactivity.
So you can actually track student progress.
And then again, end of class reflection,
what was the muddiest point?
So very similar to what we just did
in a synchronous fashion,
but now you can actually do it asynchronously as well,
especially for those students
who didn't come to the synchronous session.
-: Hey, Francis?
-: Yes?
-: I'm just wondering,
let's say I built those three questions
in our lecture, and I was gonna teach
with them synchronously and then, oh, for some reason
I'm gonna have to switch this lecture to asynchronous.
Is it easy for me to get my questions
out of my deck and into this format?
-: Great question, Cole.
So I can actually edit this assignment,
and let's say that I just wanna throw in the lecture slides.
I don't wanna double my work.
I don't wanna make those questions again
that I just created with all of you today.
I can just click this.
Sorry, sometimes I do things way too fast
'cause I know the platform.
Do you see this blue--
-: You're doing great, Francis.
-: Do you see this blue plus button here?
You just click that, click import,
and you can actually import questions
that you just created in your lecture.
So I can preview what's the best place to eat in Burlington.
Okay, select the aorta.
I can import those.
And now they're part of my asynchronous lecture,
so look at that.
I don't have the double the work.
I don't have to create those questions again.
And now they're part of my asynchronous lecture assignment.
Thank you so much, Cole, for asking that.
-: No problem.
-: Perfect, so that's the Top Hat polling,
the polling part of Top Hat,
synchronous/asynchronous at a glance.
Let's quickly hop into grade book and weekly report.
Let's look for some insights.
Since Top Hat makes it really, really easy
to actually be able to track student progress,
not just through the grade book.
So I'll give you a quick preview of the grade book here.
So the grade book is where you're actually able to assess,
manipulate results that are all sent over to Blackboard.
So I can see my attendance score here.
I can open it.
I can view an attendance report.
I can open my asynchronous lecture, my synchronous lecture.
I can see trends.
I can focus in on students,
but this can be a lot of work
if you're constantly digging through this data.
So what's another differentiator of Top Hat?
We have something called a weekly insight report,
and it looks like this.
So Top Hat takes all of this data
from students interacting with your lectures,
synchronous, asynchronous, our assignments,
and it gives you an easily digestible report
that you can action.
So you'll know which are the questions
that students are doing really well in, okay?
Which are sort of the concepts that students understand.
So you don't have to sift through that data.
Which are the concepts that students aren't getting,
so that, you know, perhaps I should be covering this
more in class.
The idea here is actionable insights.
You can actually click this button
and save the questions for the next lecture.
And then if you scroll down, at the student level,
you can actually see which students
in particular are doing exceptionally well in class.
But then what can be more insightful
is which students are struggling
or at risk of not doing well,
giving you the opportunity to intervene.
Now these are the students worth helping
because they're the ones
that are actually showing up to class.
They're responding, but they're getting consistently,
they're trending towards getting inconsistent
or sorry, incorrect grades.
So really helping you to make sure
no student falls through the cracks,
making that easy for you, right?
Because with collecting all of this polling data,
there's a lot of valuable data in there
that can actually help you make
some pretty important decisions for your class.
All right.
So let's move forward. Cole, do you wanna talk a moment
about Top Hat with Blackboard and Teams?
-: Sure, and also I was just gonna respond to Laura Engelken.
Yes, absolutely.
In fact, Laura, a simpler way to put this is
once you import questions into Top Hat,
they can extremely easily be exported and imported
to other courses.
That's very easy to do.
Let me jump into this question about Blackboard.
So we'll be completing a full LTI integration
which allowed for one click grade sync
and one click roster sync.
Okay, so that means the grades and rosters
within Top Hat and Blackboard will be synced automatically
with one click.
This saves professors a lot of time,
but I also want to speak briefly
to what I was saying at the beginning of the presentation.
We are not just going to integrate with Blackboard.
We want to supercharge Blackboard.
So that means the trainings that we run
or we design with the UVM CTL,
we'll see exactly how that works when we get there,
they will start in Blackboard.
Top Hat will not be this additional thing
that you need to figure out separate from Blackboard.
They're going to work together,
and we're going to show you how to use them together.
So not only are we going to provide the integration
that ensures they work together seamlessly,
we're going to train you to use Top Hat with Blackboard
the way that works best.
-: Thank you very much, Cole, and Holly, quick question.
I know that it's 2:30.
Is it okay if we go a couple minutes over?
-: Yes, and I just wondered, Cole,
if you have a second, can you check the chat?
-: Yep, there are no plugin requirements to use this browser.
I can, yeah, there's no plugin requirements at all.
I mean, a student would have to download the app
to use it on their phone in the app store,
but the whole idea with the browser as a backup
is you can just go to TopHat.com
and get right in there and present if you need to.
No plugins required.
-: Awesome, thank you, Cole.
All right.
Let's talk about setup and support.
Cole and I are really, really excited to talk about this
because we feel in many ways,
this is exactly what makes Top Hat super strong.
We don't just like to provide a good product.
We believe that it really is also about providing
an amazing over the top service with that product.
So we are not your average 1-800 number.
In fact, I don't think we ever do that for support.
So some of you may remember in 2004.
This moment right here, for those of you who do remember,
I apologize.
We're not about to give you all free cars for today.
Really sorry about that.
But what we are going to provide
every single Top Hat user
is their very own instructional designer.
So everyone will be paired
with their own instructional designer.
Someone that helps you train and really evolve the product,
but will be an extension
of whatever support you would get from UVM.
So you get an instructional.
You get an instructional designer.
You and all faculty, you know, we don't discriminate,
will get their very own instructional designer.
So we think of this as our secret sauce.
Think of it as your own personal 100% friendly,
organic Canadian.
someone in the chemistry department
actually calls her instructional designer
her personal helper Smurf, which I thought was adorable.
So I just threw that in there.
And here are some examples of instructional,
yeah, too long of a word, whoa.
Instructional designers that have worked at UVM
helping faculty so far.
We've got Patrick, Karen Harris,
and many, many others on our team.
-: Hey, Francis, could you,
I guess you could stay here on this slide.
I just wanna quickly jump in and say something.
So I would like to point something out.
We have the most, and maybe the only, you know,
large instructional design team
of any vendor in education technology
that's working with professors,
but it's not our secret sauce
because people need this team to use Top Hat.
All of the innovators in the room,
people have used tools like Top Hat.
You know, they will not be named in this presentation,
but you know exactly what I'm talking about
using Top Hat for the first time will be like riding a bike.
But the reason why this is our secret sauce
is because we are able to onboard 87-year old professors
who have never used Chrome before.
That's a recent case that happened recently,
and it took many hours, but we've got the team to do it.
I don't wanna give the impression
that everyone's gonna need this support.
Oftentimes the most tech savvy faculty at a school
will tell us to leave them alone,
and they don't want any training.
That's fine.
They'll have someone to reach out to if they'd like,
but I find, this is our secret sauce
because it allows us to work
with every faculty member at UVM, ensure they're successful,
ensure their students have a fantastic experience,
no matter where they lie on the adoption curve,
whether you're an innovator
or technology's something you've never really used before.
Thank you, Francis.
-: No, thank you, Cole.
That was an extremely, extremely important point to add.
So a bit more detail on the instructional designer.
Like I said, an extension of your institution support
with in-house experts that tailor your training
for your specific needs, pedagogical goals.
I'll give you a couple examples
of what they can help you with.
Let's say you're migrating
from a different student response system.
Let's say you're using Poll Everywhere
and you wanna switch to Top Hat.
They'll do the heavy lifting
behind transferring those questions.
Let's say that you wanna learn best practices
around implementing active learning online.
Many instructors haven't taught online.
They are trained to really help you with that.
And with a small or large classroom to help you use Top Hat
in tandem with Blackboard,
to provide the best active learning experience.
How can I increase attendance in class?
You can ask them if they can see
if there's any OER available for your course.
Or maybe you just wanna upload some quizzes
that you have to Top Hat. Really, there's just so many ways
that we're ready to help you.
And then Cole, can you speak to the concierge service
a little bit?
-: Sure, so the concierge service.
I'm just gonna read this slide,
and then I'll speak a bit about it
because I think it speaks for itself.
We've got a team, a scalable team,
a big team that can build stuff for you
that you don't want to do.
If you're sitting here thinking,
Oh, the last thing I wanna do is take all of my stuff,
what I'm using now and get it into Top Hat.
This team is the one that's gonna take that off your plate.
Okay, they can build Top Hat questions for you.
Convert question banks from other tools
into Top Hat for you
and arrange them into a format of your liking.
One day, you just pop into Top Hat,
and all of your content's already in there.
I'm not exaggerating when I say this.
You can give us a word document with 500 questions
that you've built out in there,
and we will build them into Top Hat for you.
There's no limit on questions.
And this is a scalable, this is so scalable
that this is a tool that's being taken advantage of
or will be taken advantage of
by the State University of New York system.
It is scalable, and it makes transitioning from another tool
quick and easy.
We just need a two week turnaround time.
So as long as you don't send us 500 questions
a day before the first day of class,
and you give us two weeks to get it into your course,
we can make this transition painless and seamless for you.
All right.
Our support system is designed
for helping you transition to Top Hat.
-: And just to add to that,
we do have many faculty that are using Top Hat
for assessments, for assignments and quizzes, tests.
And that's where these question banks
are especially helpful.
So there's actually someone
in the biomedical sciences department
who we recently helped get 500 of his immunology questions
into Top Hat so that he could run in class questions
and also assessments for her students.
So we're not exaggerating when we say 500.
In terms of student support, Cole?
-: Yeah, but this will be quick.
Students should never come to any of you about Top Hat
unless they're excited and wanna tell you how awesome it is.
They have their own support line at Top Hat,
support@tophat.com,
and the support agents that work
with those students are incentivized
based on how quickly they can help them
and their satisfaction.
So we take all of the student support off of your plate.
You can send, in fact, we encourage you
to send them all to support@tophat.com
and tell them there's a team there
waiting to answer your question.
So you never need to worry about dealing with students
having any sort of difficulties, not that they do,
but we've got a team to take care of that for you.
Except when we help you collect student evaluations
which we will do.
We want you to evaluate your students
on Top Hat about Top Hat
because this is the data that makes us look the best.
Students love it.
So you don't, you don't need to worry about Top Hat
in terms of your students, unless they love it
and they wanna tell you how great it is.
-: I'll just run through this next slide pretty quickly
in the interest of time.
But so the instructional design process is really simple.
Every professor, it's just three easy steps.
We call it the Top Hat Academy.
You meet and greet your instructional designer,
talk about your goals, halfway, you know,
if it were all 21 that you'd be using Top Hat,
that would be in around March maybe.
Sometime in the summer
you would talk about the most effective way
to drive engagement, participation in class.
And then finally you'd invite your students
to the platform, and we would continue supporting you
into the semester.
Back to you, Cole.
-: Yep, so the point of the presentation thus far
was, you know, it was to ensure that everyone feels
that Top Hat is the best and most robust polling solution,
that we've got the top of the market
white glove service support
that will make it a painless and seamless transition
onto our platform,
and that not only do we integrate well with Blackboard,
we'll train you how to use Top Hat in Blackboard.
You know, depending on the priorities of the CTL,
we'll work with them to design those trainings.
But once we've won this polling solution evaluation,
something great will happen afterwards.
After we win polling solution evaluations,
which is what we need to focus on here,
we introduce our low cost content
and OER marketplace to faculty at partner institutions
and help you adopt this content with all that support
which lowers your student costs.
This is already being done at the University of Vermont.
And if you choose to go this route,
if you could just go back quickly, Francis,
Top Hat will become your all in one solution.
Next slide.
-: Thank you, Cole.
So the way we're thinking about this is
as Cole said today, yes, it is the focus the polling system,
but in the future, you know, we are conscious of the fact
that faculty will be using there different tools,
and tech fatigue can be a real thing.
So there will be faculty who adopt
or create their own content in Top Hat.
There are faculty at UVM right now who've done this,
where Top Hat is actually their all in one solution.
It's not just their polling system, it's their assessment,
it's their textbook, it's their homework platform.
It's quite literally,
there is a faculty member that has a hundred percent
of their grade on Top Hat.
So it really is as much or as little as you wanna do with it
to really create this seamless experience for students.
And so, as Cole mentioned, this is already happening at UVM.
In geography we have an author,
we have somebody who created a Top Hat textbook
and has it in the same platform
that they use to poll students.
In chemistry, we have people who stopped using Sapling
in order to use Top Hat's interactive homework packs.
In Biomedical sciences, we have faculty
who have stopped using paper lab manuals
and are now using interactive lab manuals
right within Top Hat.
And then finally just our marketplace at a glance.
The average cost of a textbook
on the Top Hat marketplace is $35.
We have over 600 textbooks.
65% of the content is free,
and there's over 2000 resources, course packs,
homework packs, you know, syllabus-week question packs,
tons and tons of stuff out there.
It's just a massive resource for students.
And I'm sorry, for instructors.
And this is just a preview
of the low cost dynamic interactive content.
And then finally, Cole.
-: So I'll talk a little bit about how over the course
of this pandemic accessibility,
and especially due to the fact that it's so now,
the terms inclusivity, diversity and accessibility of all,
though there's a lot of interaction between these terms,
and they're all, I find that they all impact each other
very strongly, and this is very, very important right now
when it's more, it can be more difficult than ever
for some students to get the learning experience
they could have had prior to COVID, et cetera.
And we now pride ourselves
on being the most accessible ed tech vendor and publisher
in the market.
And I'm gonna give you an example of this.
At Brown University, which has adopted Top Hat,
and similar to how I just explained,
adopted us as a polling solution
but then became a big low cost and OER content partner.
They have turned off, they've turned off LTI integration
at Brown University for every ed tech vendor and publisher,
except for Top Hat and McGraw-Hill
because we're the only two that are accessible enough
to meet their standards.
We take this very seriously, and we approach accessibility
with a spirit of the law approach.
Meaning we don't just try and get a certification.
We build every part of our product in the spirit
of making it accessible for students everywhere.
And that will continue.
Thank you, Francis.
-: Thank you so much, Cole.
All right, so Cole, take us away with the key takeaways.
-: Sure, I think I've said this already
which is good because it's been through a lot today.
Top Hat is the best polling solution
and the easiest to use.
Our one-on-one instructional design support
and concierge team will help you transition
from another tool painlessly,
and Top Hat integrates seamlessly with Blackboard.
And we will show you how to use them together.
Finally, the best schools in the Northeast
are partnering with Top Hat, and we'd love UVM to be next.
And when I say the best schools,
I'll mention right now our two most recent partners
in the Northeast, Brown University
and Penn State University.
Brown University partnered with us in a non-monetary fashion
where the price is discounted for students.
Whereas Penn State purchased a site license
for Top Hat in October.
We'd love for the University of Vermont to join this team.
The market, the market is here, and we're ready.
Thank you.
-: Thank you so much.
And Holly, sorry that we went a little bit over time there,
so thank you for your patience
and thank you, Cole, for taking us home.
-: No problem.
Thank you, Francis and Cole.
And now we'll open it up for question and answer,
and you can raise your hand using the raise your hand tool.
You can also continue to post some things in the chat.
-: We weren't that good.
-: Were there a lot of questions coming up in the chat, Cole?
-: Just some normal key clarification questions
I think I answered which were all pretty good questions
that should have been asked frankly.
-: Awesome.
-: I saw something about a group question,
and I'm wondering what or a group response is?
I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit more about that.
-: Yeah, absolutely.
So that's, there's a question setting
where students can actually,
the instructor can set pre-assigned groups
where rather than it being one response per one student,
regardless of the question type, so if it's a discussion,
if it's a numeric, it actually encourages group work.
So it will be one response submitted by a group of students.
And so they will all get the same grade for that response.
So that's kind of more for group work style questions
-: Presumably that that would work better
for an in-person setting?
-: You know, I heard it definitely works good
for in-person settings.
I haven't heard too much about online,
but I imagine it could still work online as well.
-: Yeah, I think Jen's probably right
that it would work better in person,
but let me paint a picture for you
how I've seen this used.
I guess, ideally in-person,
you've got all of your students sitting in groups,
but I mean, realistically,
I'm not sure that always ends up being the case
for a student lecture.
They end up scattered around
and not necessarily able to collaborate next to each other,
but the way, I mean, I took a couple of marketing classes
when I went to school at McGill, we were,
did most of our teamwork outside of class
and during the lecture we were paying attention
and listening.
And in this case, the work you're doing outside together
as a group, you're gonna want to, as a group,
respond to that question together and get it right.
And it's not necessarily about the collaboration in class.
It's just the fact that there's gonna be one answer
assigned to the four of you,
and the knowledge that you gained
working together outside of class
will determine how well you do on these questions in class.
So yeah, I suppose it works best
when you've got students sitting together
in groups in class,
but it's still certainly very useful outside of class,
especially, or in a remote setting,
especially now when students are communicating remotely.
I mean, that's the only way they can communicate.
So I think yes and no.
Oh, Holly, I think you're muted, sorry.
-: Other questions folks have?
-: Do instructors have to download software
for Top Hat or is it all browser-based?
-: Browser-based, we want this to be,
we designed this in the spirit
of being able to use different devices and being flexible.
So, you know, if your laptop, if you bring your laptop
to a class, and you've got a desktop there,
your laptop dies, you can just go to TopHat.com,
use it on the desktop immediately.
You don't need to download anything.
-: And is there an instructor mobile app
if that were something people wanted to use?
-: Well, the mobile app, there's not a,
there is an app for the, for presenting with the, okay.
There is an app that allows a professor to present
in a certain way, but it's really designed
to use the browser, and it's optimized for that.
And I hear where you're coming from,
but I don't think we've ever received a request
to use an app instead.
This seems to be easier and just better for people,
but maybe something to look into.
-: If an instructor were using a mobile device,
primarily for teaching, they would just be using a browser?
-: Ah, yes, we have an iPad presentation app.
So if you're using an iPad as a professor,
you wanna walk around the class,
we do have an iPad app to make it easier for you to present.
You're right.
You asked the right question.
I forgot to mention that.
-: I can actually add to that, Cole.
So we do have instructors in chemistry who use Top Hat
on their iPad, both to present and to edit their courses.
But if you're talking about a mobile device
and like an iPhone, we don't have an app
for kind of like editing and presenting on there.
Since the experience would be tough to optimize,
but for the iPad we certainly do and for tablets.
-: Yeah, since it seems like there's not many many questions,
I may as well elaborate.
We did try this.
We used to have a phone presenter app,
but it just doesn't give a great experience
for the professor.
It's too small and very few people used it.
And it seems to us that smaller than an iPad
doesn't seem very practical to be presenting with.
That's what our customers have told us.
So we've designed our product accordingly,
but we did try that once upon a time.
Who knows, maybe a UVM faculty will teach us differently.
We love that. We love to learn from our customers.
That's how we build everything.
-: I don't want to monopolize time,
but I'll ask another question,
and folks feel free to jump in.
The vendor support I saw was strong for instructors,
is that same support available for students?
-: So professors get one-on-one instructional design support.
So think of it as having your person
that you can call or email
whenever you want to schedule a training,
and you can schedule unlimited training sessions
with your person or your instructional designer.
It's up to you.
Students have their own support line
which is support@tophat.com.
That is designed for students,
but professors can also use it if, you know,
let's say your person is sick.
You can use support at tophat.com to get urgent assistance,
but all students should be using support@dtophat.com.
We will get on phone calls with students and help them.
And we have a whole system
built around ensuring students get helped
as quickly as possible.
And that they're satisfied after the experience.
That is a big part of our support team.
So yeah, students have their own support line,
but they don't get a one-on-one.
That wouldn't be practical.
I would say, Laura, that actually the biggest problem
that students have is not really a problem.
The biggest problem that actually is for faculty
which is why we take it off your hands
is that students like to, when they don't show up to class
and lose their attendance marks claim that they were there
and say, oh, attendance, didn't work. I was there.
What the heck?
But we have ways of checking if they actually were.
So that's why you defer everything over to us.
When it comes to technical problems,
there are no common issues.
There are random things that go wrong now and then,
usually right now it's to do with students
working from home.
Well, I guess maybe they're getting used to it now,
but over the last year, it's been more using things at home
for the first time,
installing things or something like that.
But there's really no common problems
that we run into with students
other than trying to claim that something didn't work
when it did.
-: So I just have a follow-up to that.
Do they have an account?
Do the students maintain an account
that then they access all their different courses through?
Or do they just do things separately
through different courses? -: No, they have one dashboard.
So similar to as a professor, when Francis signed in,
and you had three courses to choose from,
the student would also have their current three courses
to choose from.
And then to make the dashboard simple
and not confusing and cluttered,
at the end of the semester,
those three courses will become inactive.
They can still access them, but they'll disappear.
And their active courses will show up there.
So they only see in their dashboard,
current courses they're taking with Top Hat,
but they can still go back and access material
from the past in their inactive courses section.
So they certainly get an account.
And that's important for,
we shouldn't get into the weeds on this,
but privacy and security reasons.
It's very important that they use their UVM email
to build their student account.
Good question.
Thank you.
I think Holly has a question.
-: I was just curious how the data is saved?
So if you as a student wanna go back,
can you see any polling questions that were asked
during a class session?
Are there any tools that are available
for studying what was covered in class, and yeah?
-: Yeah, great question, Holly.
So I know we went through a lot today
and Francis expertly went through it very quickly.
Thank you, Francis,
but every piece of content in the Top Hat platform,
when you click on it, you have the option to present it
or assign it.
So the idea is you present your slides with the polls,
and then you assign them to the students indefinitely.
They can go back, they can go through the results.
They can go through everything, but you're in control.
If you don't want to assign a certain lecture,
you don't have to.
So the professor needs to assign the material
after it's been presented,
and the students have access to everything that's assigned.
So for example, when I'm in my Top Hat course
which Francis built, this might be a bit small,
but at the bottom, there's an assigned, oops,
an assigned option.
And I can see all the material that's been assigned
in there, but then I can go into the classroom
and see what's being presented right now.
Good question.
-: Thank you.
-: Sorry, just to follow up on that, so I'm clear,
if an instructor presents presents content
but then doesn't assign it after the fact,
can students go back and see what happened during class?
-: Nope.
-: Okay.
-: Yep, the professor has to assign it
for the students to have access to it
after it's been presented.
-: And that assignment is tied to points
in the Top Hat grade grade book.
-: Yes, every assessment in Top Hat.
Think of it as, you know, the multiple choice question
that Francis built, the word answer question,
that same question can be used in a homework assignment.
That same question can be used in a quiz.
And every assessment is tied to the Top Hat grade book
which syncs with one click to the Blackboard grade book.
-: But if you didn't want students,
like you didn't want it to be an assignment,
you just wanted to give them access
to what happened in class.
You'd have to go through and sort of reset things
to zero points or something so that it didn't.
-: No, nope, we make it much easier.
So we're conflate,
well, I'm probably conflating the terms
assign and assignment, Jen.
These are different things.
You have the option to present or assign a piece of content.
Then you'll see that that asynchronous course
that Francis had.
That's what I'm referring to as an assignment,
a piece of asynchronous content.
When you click assign, it gives you the option for,
Francis what's the term?
It's to review or?
-: Yep, it's review or homework.
-: Review or homework.
Homework is graded, review is not graded
because we don't want you to have to go back
and reset everything.
That was, five or six years ago that was a big thing
that we fixed by adding the review option
where it's just low stakes,
go through the questions as many times as you want.
So a professor would assign an assignment first as homework,
and then once the grades have been collected,
you then assign it as review
so they could study with it before the exam.
-: So I'll just give a quick visual here.
-: That would probably be better, thank you, Francis.
-: No worries.
You're very descriptive, but I'll just--
-: I try my best.
-: I'll make everyone's life a bit easier.
So here you can see that the orange icon,
so what I did is I clicked my lecture after I ran it.
I clicked, now I can unassign it because it's assigned,
but I assigned this,
and that's why it's actually highlighted in orange.
That means it's assigned as homework.
And then all my students--
-: Uh oh, Francis, don't leave me here.
I'm kidding, it's fine.
We'll be okay.
-: I think he must have lost connection, but Cole,
Travis has put a question in the chat
that we could attend to and then hopefully Francis
will make his way back to us.
-: No, Travis, we do not discriminate amongst partnerships.
All of our partners, whether monetary or non-monetary
receive that SSO integration.
We want all of our partner schools
to have the best experience,
even if you don't have the budget
to invest in a site license.
We treat our school pay and student pay partners
as equally valuable partners.
-: Sorry, I think I got kicked out.
-: That's okay.
We had a question in the chat.
So we did that until you came back to us.
-: Okay, so sorry about that.
Not sure what happened there, but if I may,
I'm just gonna quickly hop back
to what I was trying to show
right before I accidentally left.
So to go back to when you assign things in Top Hat,
so can everyone hear me?
-: Yes.
-: Okay, perfect.
And there's the, it's highlighted in orange,
meaning to the instructor that it's assigned.
On the student device, so you'll notice on the bottom,
I have three options.
I have what's going on in my classroom.
I can click on what's assigned to me.
So if you're using a Top Hat textbook,
you'll be able to assign, assess your readings here
or just your assignment
or whatever else your instructor assigned
which in this case was actually the lecture slides.
So I can go in, I can actually view the slides
from the class on my phone,
and I can view the questions as well
and what my response was.
I can also just on my device,
always refer to my Top Hat grade book at the bottom.
So I, as a student,
can not only see my attendance at a glance,
but also how I'm doing in the class,
and how I'm actually doing at a more granular level
on my assignments
in the different polling sessions
that have taken place as well.
So that's a quick summary of assigning.
Thank you.
-: And you see the, did you explain
the assigned to individuals?
There's also another step there where you can be assigning
different things to certain groups of students.
We make that really easy.
-: Yeah, so this comes back to Top Hat
being inclusive and accessible.
So you can have special accommodations.
If some students require more time,
you can actually select specific deadlines
for certain students that may, you know,
have differently abled students
who may require more time for the assignment.
And that's one of the pieces that is related to
the accessibility and inclusivity of Top Hat.
Thank you, Cole.
-: Not a problem.
-: Well, thank you very much, gentlemen.
This has been really helpful for us to see the product
and hear all the services that you all provide.
And we are very happy that you were able to join us today.
-: Well, we're very happy to be here.
Had nothing but pleasant experiences with your team
and UVM faculty in general.
So I'd like to thank everyone for attending,
taking the time to listen to us talk as we like to do.
And we certainly hope to get the chance
to speak with all of you again soon.
-: Jen, you had something you wanted to add?
-: Yes, I just wanted to say to folks who are here,
we have a short survey
that should take you about five minutes to fill out
so that our committee can collect some feedback
on what you learned today.
So I'll put that here in the chat,
and we'll also send that out as an email this afternoon
or tomorrow morning.
-: And if you, if you are going ahead to click on that,
it's a Microsoft form.
So you'll need to log in
with your UVM ID and password to fill it out please.
Thank you so much.
I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the day.
-: You have a wonderful day and week two.
-: Thank you so much, Holly.
Thanks, everyone.
Bye.
-: Take care.
-: Bye.