Tony Bates, who helped pioneer distance education and computer assisted learning at the University of British Columbia, says that leadership is critical to solving the privacy and digital literacy dilemmas that have existed in education since the 1990s
Top Hat’s revised grade and attendance management system is designed to be intuitive and easy to learn. Product manager Karthiga Vezhavendan talks about the gradebook's great new features
While exams are designed to test and score knowledge, they don’t always indicate how well students are progressing through course material. That’s where curriculum based measurement comes in. Developed by researchers in the late 1970s, this objective assessment technique quickly measures student progress — and responsiveness to various teaching techniques — ultimately producing a better […]
Video: Washington State University’s Leslie Sprunger helps veterinary students behave professionally by using peer assessment
Learn when it’s appropriate to set a multiple choice test for college students, and how to make sure they achieve your classroom’s learning goals — even higher-order thinking
In this edited extract from a Top Hat e-book, we look at formative vs summative assessment, and how both have roles to play in a well-structured course. We also look at how effective deployment of one can help the other, and why student achievement depends on a good balance between evaluation and teaching and learning
Bloom’s taxonomy: Questions to set in formative assessment How do you set your students up for success, promote student learning, and help them achieve their learning goals? And, at the end of the day, how do you know that they’re even understanding what you’re teaching? The answer lies in ongoing, or formative assessment that is […]
Students aimlessly filing out of class two-thirds of the way through? There’s an established way you can let them go out of the door with purpose and accomplishment: exit tickets
According to Michael deBraga, Top Scholar and Associate Professor at the Robert Gillespie Academic Skills Centre in the University of Toronto, students are often more focused on marks than mastery. In this blog post, he describes a couple of ways to you can nudge them in the direction of understanding rather than repetition—by making some simple changes to the way you assess them
Here are some STEM assignment creation tools that can foster active engagement at home, while being uniquely targeted to help students learn the particular subject you’re teaching
Many might consider multiple choice questions a trivial waste of time in the classroom, and prone to wild guesses. But Top Hat Scholar and Distinguished Lecturer Emeritus of biology at University of Wisconsin-Madison, Andrew Petto, explains how, when you add a little more sophistication to them, you can start getting a good understanding of your students’ progress towards mastery
With so much uncertainty in the job market, self-regulated learning has become an essential skillset for lifelong learning and the ability to adapt to changing job requirements
Auto-graded fill in the blank questions are hard to fit to the needs of students. Here's how to create them on Top Hat and allow room for flexible answers
In an exclusive excerpt from our latest e-book, Active Learning: The Perfect Pedagogy for the Digital Classroom, education journalist Philip Preville demonstrates how digital technology can be adapted to the classroom to help facilitate active learning tactics. Over the last 25 years, as lecturing’s reputation as a sound teaching method has waned, the concept of […]
‘Instructional design’ is much more than a campus buzzword, and Top Hat’s Manager of Customer Success Enablement, Mike Di Gregorio, has practical knowledge of how powerful it can be. A former academic and instructor, Di Gregorio started at Top Hat right when instructional design was picking up steam in the academic field and has seen, […]
Enforcing academic integrity can be a challenge when it comes to setting assignment or test questions. One way Top Hat can help is through randomly generated questions, where you can assign a numerical range or a set of phrases to choose from—and have them automatically graded. There are two question types, which can be accessed […]
Visual learners make up 65 percent of the student population, according to the Social Science Research Network. So it only makes sense that if you’re teaching using slides, diagrams and charts, you should test knowledge in class by asking lecture questions in the same medium. Top Hat’s “click on target” question format shows students an […]
Long before the existence of the Internet, students have found ways to cheat. They wrote mathematical formulas on their hands or tried to sneak a peek at their neighbor’s exam paper. But in the digital age, to prevent cheating in college, instructors have to give up more of their time. Now, students can copy and […]
Alternative assessment is about as “alternative” in your average university or college classroom as alternative music: which is to say pretty mainstream. While alternative assessment was once a push-back against the old Greek and British “I teach, you learn” lecture and testing styles that represent the foundations of the western education system, almost every faculty now […]
Faced with unrelenting pressure to achieve high grades and increased competition for jobs and graduate school slots, students are resorting to risky measures in order to get ahead. In a survey of over 70,000 undergraduate students conducted by the International Center for Academic Integrity, 68 percent of respondents admitted to cheating on a test or […]