Top Hat Reviews

“Useful Peer Review feature

Pros

Nothing difficult about it right from the start. Onboarding was smooth for me. I've been relying on it for over 2 years now to help students grasp concepts and assess their knowledge through quizzes. The peer review feature has become one of my go-to features especially since it syncs with Canvas and streamlines my grading process.

Cons

The only thing that bothers me is the price point. It's a bit expensive compared to alternatives like clicker.

“Awesome Tool packed with features

Pros

Really simple to join sessions with the class code they give you. The free version comes packed with features that let you actually participate instead of just sitting there. What I like most is how it tracks your progress over time. You can see if your getting better or worse each class which definitely makes you more accountable for your own learning.

Cons

One and only issue I've noticed is that refreshing can be pretty slow sometimes so there's a delay when trying to get the most current information on screen.

“Not Suitable for Math-Heavy Courses

Pros

The gradebook works really well for me. Assigning questions to students who missed class is easy and saves time.

Cons

Top Hat software has a frustrating bug with math questions. Whenever I try to create problems involving mathematics, I get an error saying "Answers cannot contain commas." I've reported this issue to support but they told me fixing it isn't a priority. This makes the platform pretty much useless for anyone teaching math-heavy courses.

“Reliable and User-Friendly Tool

Pros

It usually works very well. We've only experienced one outage total and that includes both planned and unplanned downtime. Most issues I can handle myself but when I do need help, tech support is easy to reach. I appreciate that web accessibility seems to be a real priority for them and the development team responds quickly to feedback.

Cons

Constant updates and changes make it tough for me to stay on top of training materials and track bugs as part of our support team. Their documentation often lags behind the actual software and while they've started publishing release notes, they're still not well organized or consistent. It feels like they didn't originally think clients would need this kind of information though they're slowly getting better at it.

“excellent method to keep students focused during lessons.

Pros

Being able to use my phone alongside my laptop during lectures keeps me much more engaged, particularly when I'm attending classes remotely.

Cons

In my opinion graphics could be improved. I've run into situations where charts are tough to read when I need to quickly find specific information.