What is TopHat?

Top Hat is a tool instructors can use to increase engagement in the course. Students use the Top Hat on their phones, tablets, or laptops to engage in course materials in a quick fashion. It can promote active learning and collaboration, even in large lecture courses.

How can you use TopHat in your course?

Top Hat can be especially useful in large lecture courses as you can quickly assess student feedback and learning. Making sure any teaching or learning assistants you have in the lecture have access to the answers so they can help with feedback and response as well is important to the success of Top Hat in your course.

If you decide to use Top Hat in your course, make sure that you ask yourself the following questions as you prepare to integrate it or enhance its use in your course:

• Why am I asking this question? How does it tie into what we’re doing in the class today?
• Is this a comprehension check or a way to track student engagement?
• What do I want my students to learn through engaging with this question?
• How will the results of this question form my response in the course (e.g. recovering materials, opening the lecture for questions, etc.)?

What results can you expect from incorporating TopHat into your course?

There are many ways that using TopHat can help your large lecture course students engage with material as well as allow you to quickly assess students’ understanding of course topics. For example, MATH:1440 began using TopHat to ask students quick multiple choice questions during lectures, which allowed the instructor to gauge at a glance how many students were grasping concepts. If students were having trouble with certain concepts, the instructor could take time to delve into those specific difficulties or direct the teaching assistants to cover these topics more in depth in their discussion sections.

TopHat can be used for much more than simply tracking attendance; these quick flash polls of student comprehension can guide your lecture preparation, Q&A sections, and help your teaching assistants know how to help students in discussions or labs.

Who can help if you’re interested in incorporating TopHat into your course?

If you are interested in exploring how to begin using Top Hat in your course, please reach out to the Academic Technologies team. If you would like to explore how you could use this in your course, please reach out to the the Office of Teaching, Learning and Technology or the Center for Teaching for assistance and guidance on how best to implement these activities.

For further information, the Office of Teaching, Learning, and Technology has a page on best practices for Top Hat use: https://teach.uiowa.edu/top-hat/best-practices