Top Hat’s all-in-one teaching and learning platform complements Canvas by serving as a powerful student engagement layer. Make learning active with interactive, customizable textbooks, discussion and polling features, and flexible options for secure tests and assignments to create a connected learning experience before, during, and after class. With real-time insights into student progress, and dedicated one-to-one onboarding and instructional design expertise, Top Hat makes learning more accessible, insightful, and motivating for today’s students.
With Top Hat, you can:
Interactive customizable content
- Bring your course material to life by choosing from hundreds of Top Hat’s affordable interactive textbooks you can fully customize to your needs.
- Deliver and manage powerful course content designed to engage and motivate students to learn.
- Create and customize course content with easy-to-use authoring tools that allow you to incorporate videos, simulations, interactive homework questions, and more.
Live discussions
- Educators can ask open-ended questions and incorporate multimedia elements to engage students and spark dynamic in-class conversations.
- Anonymize responses to give all students the comfort and confidence to participate.
- All of these interactions are tracked automatically, giving educators real-time signals and insights into student progress and participation.
Real-time signals and insights on student performance
- Improve student outcomes by accessing insightful reports on student progress, participation, and performance with just one click.
- Easily identify struggling students and difficult concepts that require additional support and reinforcement.
- When Canvas and Top Hat are used together, data insights in both solutions create a full-circle feedback loop that paints a complete portrait of individual student progress.
Community and connectedness
- Foster community and belonging in the classroom by leveraging interactive tools that get students working and collaborating together.
- Leverage a steady stream of performance insights to deliver the feedback and ongoing mentorship that can be so transformative to student success.
Access
Testimonials
- “After using Top Hat and the interactive textbook, students were able to engage in deeper level thinking and hands-on activities.” — Katie Thompson-Laswell, Senior Instructor of Human Development and Family Science, Kansas State Univ...
- “An opportunity to engage at a deeper level enables critical thinking. Together with all the measurements we did, it was evident that students increased critical thinking skills through Top Hat and the course more broadly.” — Matt Numer, Associate Professor, Health Promotion, Dalhousie University
- “Top Hat has been pivotal. It creates a personal connection between the professor and the student.” — Todd Curtis, Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Texas
- “Student enrollment is up, my classes are full, and now there’s a wait list.” — Demian Hommel, Senior Instructor of Geography, Environmental Sciences and Marine Resource Management...
Accessibility
Top Hat is dedicated to continuously improving our websites, applications and features to create an accessible and inclusive learning environment for as many students as possible. Our products and services are designed based on the internationally recognized Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA and Section 508 standards in the United States.
To ensure and validate our accessibility compliance, a third-party vendor conducts regular audits of the Top Hat platform.
Please learn more about our accessibility commitment here: https://tophat.com/company/legal/accessibility-top-hat/
Security
Privacy
Integration Instructions
Top Hat currently offers 3 types of integration with Canvas: LTI 1.1, Advanced Sync, and Hybrid. Support for LTI 1.3 and all associated Advantage services is under active development for release in Fall 2022.
LTI 1.1
LTI 1.1 is the quickest and easiest integration to set up. Professors create an assignment in their LMS course which students will click on to link their Canvas and Top Hat accounts. An aggregate grade for all Top Hat course activities will be sent from Top Hat to this Canvas assignment and will appear as a single column in the Canvas gradebook.
For the initial set up, we offer a "white glove" concierge service to administrators to walk you through the process. Email us at support@tophat.com. Once the connection is established, professors can follow these steps to leverage the integration: https://support.tophat.com/s/article/Professor-LTI-Setup-Canvas
Advanced Sync
Advanced Sync requires a direct API connection to Canvas, and enables a tighter more flexible integration between Top Hat and Canvas. The single aggregate gradebook column supported by LTI is supported here, as well, but multiple columns, each aggregating "folders" or "units" of Top Hat content can be specified, instead. Advanced Sync also allows a "one click" synchronization of Top Hat and Canvas student lists (rosters).
We offer a "white glove" concierge service for administrators where we will walk you through the integration process and answer all your questions. Please reach out to support@tophat.com to get started! Professors can follow these steps to utilize the integration: https://success.tophat.com/s/article/Professor-Advanced-Canvas-Integration
Hybrid
For those professors or institutions that prefer using LTI 1.1 for rostering but wish to have more flexibility with the gradebook population, Top Hat supports a hybrid solution that uses LTI 1.1 and Advanced Sync together. Please refer to the support articles above for more information on LTI 1.1 and Advanced Sync.
LTI 1.3
LTI 1.3 support is being actively developed and will include all of the LTI Advantage services: Deep linking, Names and Roles Provisioning Services (NRPS), and Assignment and Grades Services (AGS). Top Hat will replace LTI 1.1 and Advanced Sync with LTI 1.3. We will provide an optional API integration that augments the LTI 1.3 integration to enable highly demanded features not (yet) supported by LTI 1.3 such as support for sections and increased flexibility of gradebook columns.
