Today’s Spotlight Series post will reflect on the second session of Top Hat Day – a faculty panel where instructors discussed how they use Top Hat in their courses. As instructors look for new ways to foster student engagement in their courses, it has become even more important to learn from our colleagues and listen to their experiences with tools that they’re using in their classes. As a part of this event, I had the opportunity to sit down with four faculty members who have varying degrees of experience with Top Hat.
The Panelists
While a number of faculty members could have been included in this session, four instructors were excited to share their ideas around Top Hat. While we were unable to schedule with representatives from each of the four divisions on campus (purely due to class conflicts), we were able to hear from the following individuals:
- Sarah Allen, Biology
- Shawn Bernecky, Business Administration
- Kaitlin Farnan, Management
- Amir Marvasti, Sociology
Some of the individuals above have been avid Top Hat users for years, while others have only just started their journey with Top Hat. I’d like to give a very special thank you to each of the panelists for their insightful contributions to this discussion.
The Conversation
Throughout the course of this hour-long session, each of our panelists provided some of their thoughts on a variety of topics. The panel began with a brief introduction of each of the members, highlighting their level of experience with the platform. We were also able to hear some of the reasons they started to explore Top Hat in their courses, such as its polling and engagement features, changing from other similar platforms, and its testing capabilities.
As a polling platform, many of the panelists talked about using the questions they pose in class as a means to understand where students are with new content and generate discussion about murky points with students. Many of them spoke to how easy Top Hat made shifting their instruction to meet the needs of the students sitting in front of them and how they worked through those misconceptions live.
In terms of testing, one instructor spoke to the Top Hat Test features that helped him provide a secure testing environment online for some of his exams. He outlined some anecdotal evidence of how powerful the lockdown browser function and Proctor Report was to this experience. In this scenario, he had a few students who attempted to navigate away from the testing environment and were forced to have a conversation with him to allow them to re-enter the exam. This conversation was immensely useful in reducing the ability for students to engage in academically dishonest practices. He has also utilized the Top Hat Concierge Service to help him generate these tests in Top Hat. While they weren’t perfect and needed some minor revisions, he found this process to be incredibly user-friendly.
We also had the chance to unpack some of the hurdles that these instructors have faced with Top Hat. Some of these issues stemmed from quirks with Top Hat, namely a lack of a curving feature and the ways in which Top Hat syncs with Canvas, but others related back to campus infrastructure issues like Wifi outages and dropped connections. We were able to discuss some solutions that they used to get through those experiences and spoke with the Top Hat representatives in the room to advocate for improvements to the platform.
The Takeaways
Each of the four panelists expressed their overall satisfaction with Top Hat as well as the positive feedback they have received from their students. In fact, some voiced how their students were seeking out more opportunities to engage with the platform as a way to test their own knowledge about what they were learning.
As we wrapped up the session, panelists were asked for some advice for instructors looking to incorporate Top Hat in their classes. One panelist said, “Don’t be afraid of it. It is just a tool,” explaining that there may be some hurdles to overcome as exists when using any new tool in teaching. Another insightful comment from a panelist was, “The more you use it, the more ways you find to use it.” With such a variety of features, Top Hat really provides a lot of opportunities for instructors, which can be overwhelming. Keeping this in mind, starting out small – maybe with a few polling questions or an in-class discussion – can lead to building confidence in using the more robust features of Top Hat.
In exploring Top Hat further, I’d love to see a number of faculty form a community of practice around the tool. Working with one another can help identify new use cases and strategies for improving the student learning experience. Make sure you come back to the next post in our Spotlight Series on Top Hat Day to learn more about Top Hat’s OAER offerings.
