What’s New in Top Hat (JULY/AUGUST 2018)

Release Notes: July 2018, August 2018

  • The new Student Manager now supports searching by name, email or student ID
  • Click on Target questions with multiple correct answers now support partial credit
  • In web presentation mode, the “Play/Resume”, “Correct”, and “Responses” buttons now have text labels – no more needing to guess!

A reminder for additional beta features:

  • Secure Attendance (beta): This feature is available on web, iOS, and Android – it uses the students’ devices to help determine where they are and if they are in proximity with each other. This feature can be enabled under Settings – Secure Attendance Options.
  • Group Questions (beta): This feature can be enabled by Top Hat support. Once enabled, you can put students into groups and assign questions to groups – each student can submit a response, with the final submission of a group being locked in as the group’s submission.

Work on AU18 Courses Continues! Easy Early Wins with Great Impact

The Office of Distance Education and eLearning held a focus group with students on their professors’ usage of Carmen, and created a video of the highlights:

In our Places to Start with Great Impact series (Part 1, Part 2), we offered some simple ideas for enhancing your students’ early experiences in your course. Even though July is almost over, it is certainly not too late to implement some of the ideas below – contact us today if you are interested!

  • Build as much of your course (materials) as possible now (in the master): Summer is a great time to build! Master shells are great for getting your course prepared for your students between semesters – you can start your projects (with us!) and/or revisions as we’ve got the shells prepared for a new semester, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally publishing something! As a bonus, Teaching and Learning does a final quality check of the master shells before we publish them to students in the semester shells. If you’d like instructor access to a master shell as a team member, please let your team leads know.
  • Syllabus quiz: This is a great way to make sure that your students review your course syllabus syllabus, and that you are all on the same page regarding course policies and logistics. ODEE describes an implementation in which the quiz is required, and course modules are released only upon passing. This is also a great use case for Top Hat questions, perhaps with bonus points, so your students are incentivized to review the syllabus, and also get an early, low-stakes experience of the tool
  • Course intro video: A short course introduction video can be an invaluable tool that serves multiple purposes: 1) it’s a great opportunity for you to talk briefly about your course, its purpose, why it is important, its structure, and so on; 2) it puts a face to your name; and 3) it can be your students’ first opportunity to get to know who you are as a professional, as an instructor, and/or even an individual from a personal perspective. Creating an intro video is simple with MediaSite; OTL would also be glad to help you with it!
  • Course banner: The latest iteration of the CVM Canvas Template added a banner on the home page that can be customized. We thought this might be a fun place to inject some personality into your course! Here are some examples:VM6550.01 homepage with banner
    VCS7722 homepage with banner
    VM6614.06 homepage with banner

What’s New in Top Hat (JUNE 2018)

Release Notes: June 2018

  • The pages editor has been redesigned to surface frequency-used functionality
  • You can now use Top Hat to keep track of attendance that you take outside of Top Hat
  • Newly available in beta and can be enabled by Top Hat support:
    • Long answer question type
    • Significant figures in the numeric answer question type on iOS

A reminder for additional beta features:

  • Secure Attendance (beta): This feature is available on web, iOS, and Android – it uses the students’ devices to help determine where they are and if they are in proximity with each other. This feature can be enabled under Settings – Secure Attendance Options.
  • Group Questions (beta): This feature can be enabled by Top Hat support. Once enabled, you can put students into groups and assign questions to groups – each student can submit a response, with the final submission of a group being locked in as the group’s submission.

What’s New in Top Hat (APRIL/MAY 2018)

Release Notes: April 2018May 2018

  • A new Tournament mode is in beta – we can help you get in touch with Top Hat to have it enabled!
  • The course lobby received a visual and usability update.
  • There is now a new Page Editor with an enhanced toolset, including quick discussions and knowledge check questions! This makes Pages in Top Hat a good option for out-of-class practice opportunities and assignments. We’d love to work with you on ideas, implementations, etc..
  • Numeric questions receives a beta feature where you can specify the number of significant figures that’s accepted – we can help you get in touch with Top Hat to have it enabled!
  • Instructors can now see the Top Hat – Canvas gradebook sync history.
  • iOS App
    • An issue with submitting responses with the iOS app has been resolved – please update to the latest version in the App Store.
    • An issue with the app crashing for students when instructors assign / present multiple items at once has been resolved.

In addition to the updates, we want to bring you attention to the following features:

  • Secure Attendance (beta): This feature is available on web, iOS, and Android – it uses the students’ devices to help determine where they are and if they are in proximity with each other. This feature can be enabled under Settings – Secure Attendance Options.
  • Group Questions (beta): This feature can be enabled by Top Hat support. Once enabled, you can put students into groups and assign questions to groups – each student can submit a response, with the final submission of a group being locked in as the group’s submission.

Top Hat doesn’t have to stop when the class session ends

If you are a power user of Top Hat, you may have realized that it is more than an engaging in-class student response tool in that it is also a flexible, on-demand tool for organizing your class sessions. For example, Teaching and Learning has worked with some instructors to upload their PowerPoint slides to Top Hat, where they can insert activities strategically at certain points during the class (for example, for start-of-class and end-of-class knowledge checks/reviews) and present the entire set without having to leave Top Hat.

Top Hat also now supports interactive slides that contain hyperlinks, animations, and embedded videos from YouTube or Vimeo.

The quality learning that takes place in Top Hat does not have to stop when your class session ends. While the “Present” mode makes your Top Hat content available to students in a live setting, the “Homework” and “Review” assign modes allow students to access them outside of the class.

  • Review: This mode releases content to students on a non-graded basis. When you assign a question to students for review, they will be able to respond to it and see the correct answer, but you will not have a way to tell who has completed it and how they did. This mode is great for displaying items such as learning materials, practice questions, and activities that have already taken place in class.
  • Homework: This mode releases content to students on a graded basis. When you assign a question to students for homework, their responses will be automatically graded and recorded in the gradebook. This mode is great for items like out-of-class activities that are not available in Carmen; for example, “Click on Target” and “Word Answers” (for word cloud purposes) or activities that you intended to get to during class but didn’t quite make it.

Just like in Carmen, you are able to create differentiated experiences by assigning different items to different students. You can also schedule future activities and/or offer timed activities by adjusting item availability. (More Information)

As always, for all things Top Hat, please feel free to consult with Teaching and Learning.

Top Hat Inside and Outside the Classroom

Having remote attendees during lectures makes it especially important for instructors to incorporate engaging, interactive activities. These activities allow you to check if your remote participants are attending and actively listening.

In fact, these are some of the same concerns that active learning strategies aim to address during face-to-face class meetings. If you hold in-person class sessions and expect students to attend, you may want to offer them experiences not available by watching lecture captures.

In particular, one of the active learning tools Teaching and Learning supports is Top Hat. By default, when you present a Top Hat question in class, all students who are enrolled in the Top Hat course can see and respond to it, regardless of their physical location. If it is important to you that students are participating in your Top Hat questions from approved locations only, please schedule a time to brainstorm with us.

Did you know that Top Hat also supports activities that can be completed outside of the classroom? For example, you can assign to your students slides that you have uploaded to Top Hat and questions you have asked during a class session for review purposes. You can also assign content that students complete out-of-class as homework. If you do assign graded content in Top Hat, please work with Teaching and Learning to transfer the scores back to Carmen.

For more information:

Incorporate Interactivity Into Your Courses Using Top Hat

Top Hat is fast, simple to use, and great for implementing quick participation and knowledge checks during your face-to-face class time. Top Hat is CVM’s only classroom response system for academic courses, as Teaching and Learning no longer supports the old TurningPoint clickers. 

(Watch this short video to find out more about Top Hat.)

You may have heard that you need to load your PowerPoint into Top Hat, but that is only one of the options! Using the Top Hat desktop application, you open Top Hat alongside your PowerPoint presentation without uploading it at all.

If you like that option, here’s what you can do to get started:

  • Each CarmenCanvas course can only be synchronized with one Top Hat course; please check with your team leaders to see if you already have a Top Hat course!
  • Contact Office of Teaching and Learning. We will help you create a semester Top Hat course, synchronize your student roster, and get you started with creating content and activities.
  • If you use Top Hat to give grades to students, we can also help you with synchronizing grades from Top Hat back to CarmenCanvas.

10 Top Hat Strategies for Active Learning

Top Hat provides for active learning, beyond the multiple choice “clicker” question. Below, you’ll find 10 activities to implement using Top Hat — from taking attendance and posing basic multiple choice questions to creating metacognitive “wrappers” that help build engagement.


To learn more about how to build questions and presentations in Top Hat please see our eModule: Leveraging Top Hat in Presentations.


  1. Attendance: Top Hat can be used to take attendance. Simply click on the Attendance icon at the top of the presenter pop-up or presentation screen before beginning your presentation.
  2. Summative Assessment: Top Hat can be used for graded activities, such as multiple-choice quizzes. We advise that Top Hat be reserved for low-stakes assessments.
  3. Formative Assessment: Top Hat can be used to pose questions to students and collect their answers for the purpose of providing real-time information about student learning to both the instructor and the students. Students can use this feedback to monitor their own learning, and instructors can use it to change how they manage class “on the fly” in response to student learning needs. Some instructors assign participation grades to these kinds of formative assessments to encourage students to participate. Other instructors assign points for correct answers to encourage students to take these questions more seriously. Other instructors do a mix of both, assigning partial credit for wrong answers.
  4. Homework Collection: Through the Review feature of Top Hat, students can record their answers to multiple-choice or free response homework questions and submit their answers via Top Hat outside of class. In addition, instructors can use the Pages feature of Top Hat to create high quality, multi-media content for review. Such content can be constructed with text, in-line questions, and videos all in one page.
  5. Discussion Warm-Up: Posing a question, giving students time to think about it and record their answers via Top Hat, and then displaying the results can be an effective way to warm a class up for a class-wide discussion.This approach gives all students time to think about and commit to an answer, setting the stage for greater discussion participation.
  6. Contingent Teaching: Since it can occasionally be challenging to determine what students understand, Top Hat can gauge understanding in real-time during class. If the Top Hat data show that students understand a given topic, then the instructor can move on to the next one. If not, then more time can be spent on the topic, perhaps involving more lecture, class discussion, or another clicker question. This approach has been called “agile teaching” by Beatty et al. (2006), who write, “This contrasts with the common practice of teaching according to a ‘ballistic’ lesson plan: designing a plan for an entire class meeting, ‘launching’ the plan, hoping that it hits reasonably close to its target, and waiting for the next exam to know for certain.” Certainly there are other ways to determine if students are understanding course material as one progresses through a course, but Top Hat can provide a convenient way of doing so. See also Draper & Brown (2004) for more on this approach.
  7. Peer Instruction: This is a tech adaptation of Think-Pair-Share. The teacher poses a question to his or her students. The students ponder the question silently and transmit their individual answers using the Top Hat. The teacher checks the histogram of student responses. If a significant number of students choose the wrong answer, the teacher instructs the students to discuss the question with their neighbor. After a few minutes of discussion, the students submit answers again. This technique often (but not always!) results in more students choosing the correct answer as a result of peer instruction. This approach can also set the stage for a class-wide discussion that more fully engages all students. See Mazur (1997) for more on this approach.
  8. Repeated Questions: In the peer instruction approach described above, students respond to a given question twice–once after thinking about their answer individually and again after discussing it with their neighbor. Some instructors ask the same question several times, with different activities in between rounds of “voting” designed to help students better answer the question. For instance, an instructor might have the students answer the question individually, then discuss it with their neighbor and respond, then participate in a class-wide discussion and respond, and then listen to a mini-lecture on the topic and respond. For particularly challenging questions, this can be an effective technique for helping students discover and explore course material. This can also be used as a prediction method, as suggested in James Lang’s Small Teaching. The instructor asks a question ahead of the lecture or activity to activate prior knowledge or get at misconceptions or preconceptions. Then the question is repeated after the lecture or activity to solidify the correct information (Lang 46).
  9. Muddiest Point: In this approach, students answer a discussion board question at the end of class asking asking them what concept they have not mastered or understand poorly. The instructor reviews responses and re-teaches or re-emphasizes that information during the next class, via video posted to Carmen, or in an email or discussion board.
  10. Top Takeaways/One Minute Essay: This approach is similar to the Muddiest Point, but asks the students to summarize the main ideas of the lecture. The instructor can choose to make this an essay or a bulleted list of top takeaways. The essays or takeaways should mirror the learning outcomes of the lesson. If not, the instructor can address this in the next class or via the LMS.

Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International License – Original Source: Vanderbilt University – The Center for Teaching © 2017 – “Classroom Response Systems (“Clickers”) – Derek Bruff, Director Vanderbilt Center for Teaching. Adapted and appended by Katie O’Keefe, The Ohio State University, College of Veterinary Medicine, Office of Teaching and Learning, 2017.

Online Training for Top Hat

It can be difficult to break away from the day to attend Top Hat training, so the Office of Teaching and Learning has created a tutorial to help you learn how to leverage Top Hat in your lectures. This self-paced, interactive module takes about 20 minutes to complete from start to finish and includes video demos and software simulations to help you learn more effectively. If you already use Top Hat and don’t need the whole module, there is an interactive Course Roadmap to take you through to the pieces you want to learn more about.

To start the module, follow this link to Leveraging Top Hat in Presentations.

Top Hat and the Interactive Lecture

Studies show us that Active Learning helps students learn more effectively and this is especially true of critical thinking and problem solving skills. When students are using the information, rather than listening to it, they retain it longer and are more comfortable using it when they need it. The challenge is finding active learning strategies that work in a large class.

Recently, Dr. James Belknap converted and delivered an interactive lecture that walked the class through the process of diagnosis and treatment for several cases. He did this by combining a traditional slide lecture with multiple choice and click on target questions in Top Hat, transforming a lecture where the students were passive listeners to a lecture where students were actively participating. They were engaged in the process of making decisions based on the information learned in their classes during the prior week. Not only does active learning activate prior knowledge, it encourages students to synthesize that knowledge in the decision-making process.

As the students answered, Dr. Belknap addressed incorrect answers to help refine the students’ understanding. This included pointing out things that are not directly related to medicine or symptoms, but still effect treatment like difficulties of place and season. As the lecture progressed, the students improved their accuracy and speed. In addition, he had 100% participation from the students who attended the lecture. Top Hat makes this an easy task, simply upload your slides and create your questions in Top Hat, add images where needed, and deliver the lecture.

Using technology is only one way to employ active learning strategies in the classroom. You can find some great tools at the UCAT Active Learning Strategies page. We’ll be exploring more of these ideas, high-tech and low-tech, over the coming weeks.