ASC instructors can now teach with a Top Hat but still be informal. Top Hat software allows users to create interactive lectures by combining presentation slides with discussions, polls, quizzes, and attendance tracking. 

Top Hat offers more than multiple choice questions. Instructors can get students involved in discussions. They can ask them to draw in response to a prompt. They can ask them to click on a part of a picture. With Top Hat, lectures can be more interactive than ever before.

While it is relatively new to Ohio State, instructors at over 500 universities already use Top Hat. Gary Drzewiecki, a Professor at Rutgers University, praises Top Hat’s discussion features. “The discussions and questions features most certainly increased my attendance and engagement with students. The students that normally hide in the back of class came to participate.”

OSU instructors are already praising Top Hat. Ayendy Bonifacio, a TA for the English Department’s Alternative Rock Lyrics as Poetry course, has been using Top Hat this semester. “Top Hat is really simple. It’s really easy. It saves a lot of time. With Top Hat, it takes one minute to take attendance. It takes five minutes to take a quiz. It takes zero seconds to grade a quiz. You can do a lot in five minutes with Top Hat.”

With that extra time, Bonifacio and other instructors have more time to analysis of songs, read poetry, and hold video conference discussions with musicians like Peter Silberman of The Antlers. 

To learn more about how to use Top Hat to make your lectures more interactive, get in touch with ASCTech at asctech@osu.edu. Or get started by signing up for an account at go.osu.edu/tophat.