Top Hat keeps students tuned in wherever they learn. Our dynamic courseware helps all students learn in class, while allowing educators to create interactive content that keeps them learning on their own time.
Learning
Top Hat offers over 14 question types that can be assigned in and and outside of class, allowing educators to gain insights on student understanding well beyond participation in a classroom poll.
Poll Everywhere offers just eight question types that can be used in a synchronous environment.
Seamless Presenting
Upload your slide presentations directly into Top Hat where they're stored in the cloud, making them accessible from any device. Questions are embedded directly into the slides, so presenting course content is a seamless experience. You can also use Ace, our AI-powered assistant, to instantly generate questions from your content. With Top Hat, engagement goes much further than a live poll for the classroom.
Poll Everywhere requires a plug-in to work with Powerpoint.
Affordability
Top Hat is always free for professors, and students get access to all features at one price. Take advantage of all our question types, in-class engagement tools, assessments, assignments and the gradebook to teach any course more effectively, with no added paywalls to be found.
Poll Everywhere offers a tiered payment system, which means not all users can access all features. More advanced functionality is found only behind an expensive paywall.
Performance Tracking
Top Hat’s dynamic gradebook keeps all your grades in one place,making it easy to get a 360 degree view of student performance. It also allows you to nail down how individual students are doing or how the whole class is handling specific questions. We also offer a weekly course report, which is an automated summary of all student interactions within Top Hat in that week, allowing you to quickly identify struggling students or challenging concepts.
Poll Everywhere offers five different types of reports which are only available with certain paid subscriptions. These reports all generate specific information, making it difficult to get a complete view of the data from your students.
Support
Poll Everywhere only offers email support for paid users. Phone support is not available.
Top Hat offers phone, email, and chat support for all educators and students.
of students say Top Hat helped them feel engaged in the learning process.
*Top Hat Spring 2024 Student Survey. n=21,033 students
Top Hat can be used on a variety of devices to make learning equitable and available for everyone. Plus, we designed our platform with accessibility top of mind, making it compatible with screen readers and offering keyboard navigation.
"Top Hat is much easier to use than other online platforms (such as Poll Everywhere)."
-Student from the University of Virginia
Top Hat provides unparalleled support to professors. We offer a market-leading concierge service to convert your existing content into the Top Hat platform, while a dedicated instructional designer can help ensure you meet your course goals and ease your class prep.
We offer seamless integrations with all major LMS providers including Blackboard, Canvas, D2L Brightspace, Moodle and Sakai. The Top Hat gradebook houses digital interactions between instructors and students, including results from attendance, quizzes, tests, assignments, and participation, and is available in your LMS from the moment each semester begins.
“Top Hat is super useful to engage students during lecture in multiple formats, which is a bonus. This year, grades were up and student satisfaction was the best ever in the last 15 years.”
Adam Rich
Associate Professor, Biology, The College at Brockport, SUNY
“Top Hat made the course super fun and exciting! It also was very easy to stay on top of assignments.”
-Student from Arizona State University
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