How Top Hat Helped This Professor Teach Difficult Concepts in Courses with 900 Students

The Challenge

Todd Curtis was looking for assessment tools to help students learn complex terminology

Everything’s bigger in Texas—even class sizes. At the University of Texas at Austin—a 134-year-old research institution with more than 50,000 students in attendance every year—Classics professor Todd Curtis knows all about big. When he looks out at his Intro to Medical and Scientific Terminology class, it’s not unusual for there to be upwards of 500 students staring back at him. It’s also not uncommon for him to teach upwards of 900 students in one multi-section course throughout a single semester, requiring him to track the progress of all those students.

Throughout the early 2010s, Curtis found keeping that many students engaged in classes focused on the likes of multi-syllabic Latin terminologies challenging. However, that wasn’t the only issue.

He also found that the multiple-choice assessments required in his medical terminology classes were not helping students comprehend the material, nor were they creating an environment conducive to learning inside or outside the classroom. “I wanted a classroom response system I could use for extra credit, to show students what they did and didn’t know,” Curtis says.

“I wanted a classroom response system I could use for extra credit, to show students what they did and didn’t know.”

Todd Curtis Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, University of Texas

The Results

Curtis introduced Top Hat in other classes and authored two interactive textbooks boosted by graded readings

Since he started using Top Hat, Curtis has noticed a marked improvement in students keeping up with course materials and staying engaged in class. “Top Hat has been pivotal,” he says. “It creates a personal connection between the professor and the student.”

Curtis also introduced Top Hat in two other courses—Classic Mythology and Ancient Greek Medicine. And he’s taken a concrete step towards ensuring his students do the readings. He started using two textbooks he personally authored, A Programmed Approach to Learning the Grammar and Vocabulary of Anatomical Latin and Classical Mythology in the Visual and Performing Arts, as his main course materials.

He wrote the textbooks using Top Hat’s intuitive authoring platform as a way to save his students money while offering interactive learning materials that promote comprehension. These textbooks also provide learners with content that is specifically geared towards what he’ll be teaching in class, rather than the expensive print textbooks bloated with irrelevant content. He’s able to easily distribute these textbooks to students through the Top Hat platform. “I really love this format of textbooks,” says Curtis. “It allows me to modify things on the fly and I can assess student comprehension of the reading material.”

He finds it’s also a great way to keep his students focused on topics prone to apathy. “The [Anatomical Latin] textbook, for example, offers an inductive study into Latin, so students can progressively learn certain concepts—they can actively read a textbook and I can give them credit,” he says.

Building off source materials he’d been supplementing his lectures with for years, Curtis’ book—which includes activities that count towards his students’ final grades—is one of the many ways he’s helping his class succeed. “A graded textbook is a novel idea,” he says. “It’s a nice way of getting people to read and to give them rewards for spending time with the material.”