- Features
- Ace: AI Assistant for Educators & Students
AI that keeps humanity
at the heart of learning
Use Top Hat Ace to generate interactive assessment questions, enhance course materials for accessibility and give students personalized study guidance. Ace supports students while always keeping instructors in the driver’s seat.
Make your static slides interactive
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Generate formative assessment questions and discussion prompts directly from your uploaded slides
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Maintain full control: edit, adjust, or discard AI-generated questions to mirror your learning objectives and teaching style
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Review detailed data on student participation and attendance with an actionable post-lecture report
Produce accessible and engaging course materials in seconds
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Use Ace Content Enhancer to convert static PDFs into dynamic pages and meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards
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Get instant low-stakes formative questions with explanations grounded in your curriculum to reinforce retrieval practice
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Generate real-world examples tailored to student interests or career pathways—helping learners see why the material matters
Provide 24/7 personalized study support, informed by you
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Give students access to built-in, on-demand study support that reflects your unique course content
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Ace’s chat-based study assistant lets students ask clarifying questions in exchange for tailored guidance—reducing study ‘shortcuts’
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Ensure students build confidence with bite-sized practice quizzes that help them identify and close their learning gaps
Tools for teaching, learning and engaging
Top Hat Ace is just one of the many ways Top Hat enables professors to teach with engaging content, tools and activities in online, hybrid or face-to-face classrooms.
Why students love Top Hat
I liked the addition of the Ace AI, it was very helpful and the prompts were also useful.
Student
University of Toronto
The Ace chatbot was super helpful. It would explain processes to you and application questions to you in different ways.
Student
University of Portland
Whenever I was confused about something, the AI tool would help me understand. The built in questions really helped and now microeconomics is my top class here with a 94 percent. It’s a really great tool—probably the best tool I’ve ever used.
Student
Texas Christian University
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AI teaching assistant for higher education?
An AI teaching assistant for higher education is a tool that uses artificial intelligence to support instructors and students with course preparation, active learning, and personalized study support. Unlike general-purpose AI tools, an AI teaching assistant designed for the classroom works within the context of a specific course—using assigned readings, lecture slides, and learning objectives to generate relevant questions, explanations, and practice activities.
Top Hat Ace is an AI teaching assistant built specifically for colleges and universities. It helps instructors quickly create interactive, low-stakes assessments and discussion prompts, while giving students on-demand, personalized study support grounded in their course materials. By combining AI with evidence-based teaching strategies like retrieval practice and formative assessment, Ace helps educators scale active learning and improve student outcomes.
How does Ace save instructors time?
Ace saves instructors time by automating some of the most time-consuming aspects of course preparation and content creation.
With Ace, educators can:
- Upload lecture slides and instantly generate formative assessment questions and discussion prompts
- Transform static PDFs or documents into interactive, accessible course pages
- Generate relevant examples and explanations aligned to specific learning objectives
- Create AI-powered practice activities without building them from scratch
Instead of spending hours writing quiz questions or revising materials for clarity and accessibility, instructors can review, edit, and refine AI-generated content in minutes. This allows them to focus more on teaching, mentoring, and engaging with students—while still implementing evidence-based practices that improve learning outcomes.
Is Ace secure and FERPA-compliant?
Yes. Ace is designed with student privacy and data security in mind and operates within Top Hat’s secure learning environment.
Top Hat complies with FERPA and other applicable data protection regulations. Student interactions with Ace occur within the context of their course and are governed by Top Hat’s privacy policies and institutional agreements. Data is handled according to strict security standards to protect personally identifiable information (PII).
Unlike public AI tools, Ace is built specifically for higher education and operates within the institutional framework of the course—providing personalized support while maintaining compliance, data security, and privacy protections required by colleges and universities.
What AI-technology is powering Ace?
We use OpenAI’s GPT 4.0 model to create AI-generated responses and AI-powered questions.
How is Ace different from Open AI's ChatGPT if it is powering the functionality?
The difference comes down to context. When you ask a question in Chat GPT, the relevance of the response you get depends on the quality of your prompt and the context provided in your question. Because Ace operates alongside course materials and has contextual knowledge of what is being studied, it can address student questions with relevant responses that are based on the specific course contents.
How is Top Hat using AI-technology in general?
Read our Guiding Principles on AI for more information.
Are the responses and questions that Ace provides accurate?
Not always. AI-generated content may contain inaccuracies about people, places, or facts- and may also reflect stereotypes and societal biases. Users should always independently evaluate the accuracy of any generated questions and responses.
Will you use my interactions with Ace to improve future versions of this feature?
Yes, your interactions with Ace and feedback on the questions and responses it generates may be used to enhance this feature (see Section 9.4 of the User Agreement).
Is there an additional cost to use Ace?
We are excited to get Ace into the hands of as many students and educators as possible, so there is currently no additional cost to use it.
How does Ace help deliver evidence-based learning?
Over the past 30 years in the science of learning, we’ve discovered that strategies like timely feedback, interleaving topics, spaced studying, and retrieval practice are more effective for learning. These practices call for more frequent low-stakes assessments throughout students’ learning journeys. Ace makes it faster and easier to add low stakes assessments to in-class sessions, which has been shown to help improve students’ retention and understanding across many disciplines. Learn more about the research behind Top Hat.