TOP HAT EARNS HIGH MARKS
Toronto educational software firm offers `pandemic-ready solution' with remote learning
When Brown University, a posh Ivy League school, was scrambling to offer remote education technology resources amid the pandemic earlier this year, it turned to Toronto-based Top Hat, an educational software company whose teaching and learning products had already been deployed on campus the year before.
Like other high-end institutions, Brown University was concerned it would struggle to justify its premium fees by simply offering students Zoom class links and the ability to pepper professors with emailed questions. The Providence, RI.-based university's digital learning and design team began working with Top Hat's instructional designers to develop custom courses and resources for remote learning and facilitate asynchronous engagement between students and teachers.
“Student engagement is a critical component of effective high-quality online teaching,” Top Hat CEO Mike Silagadze said in an interview. “During a time when students were feeling increasingly anxious and isolated, we were able to create a vibrant active learning community that encouraged student engagement and fostered a sense of belonging while maintaining a high-quality and effective educational standard.”
Professors are now using Top Hat to create the same type of active learning experience students would have had in class and on campus. The number of students using Top Hat tools at Brown grew by more than 300 per cent once the pandemic hit.
Founded more than a decade ago by Silagadze and Mohsen Shahini, Top Hat's goal is to draw institutions of higher learning — many of which have been reluctant to adopt new course-enhancing technologies — into the digital age.
It does this in a couple of ways: By helping them move beyond overpriced and often out-of-date print textbooks, and by providing an online education platform that enables professors to augment their students' learning experience.
“We saw a broken education system in which students pay exorbitant prices for textbooks that don't enable interactive and immersive learning,” says Silagadze. He also understood that the technology being used in universities did not reflect how people actually learn outside of the classroom. “Tech innovation was advancing by leaps and bounds outside of education, but the in-class experience was still very stale and focused on oneway communication.”
Fast forward a decade, and Top Hat's services are now in use by thousands of professors and more than three million students at 750 colleges and universities across North America, including prestigious institutions such as Penn State and MIT.
And it's not just pricey top-tier schools making the most of Top Hat's tools during COVID. To help schools get through the current health emergency, Top Hat developed a free version of the platform with much of the core functionality intact. “It provides everything educators need to host synchronous online classes and get student performance insights to identify those in need of intervention and extra support,” says Silagadze.
This combination of innovative new features designed specifically for remote learning and increased accessibility has been a massive boon for the business. Silagadze says Top Hat's revenue growth is up over 60 per cent year-overyear, and it has enjoyed a marked increase in inbound leads.
However, 2020 kicked off on a different trajectory.
The year began with the edutech company focused on accelerating its disruption of the print textbook industry. After raising $55 million in new venture capital from a group of Top Hat investors that included Toronto-based Georgian Partners and Inovia Capital, New York-based Union Square Ventures, and San Francisco-based Emergence Capital at the start of 2020, Top Hat began purchasing traditional textbook publishers — including a reportedly $30-million deal to acquire more than 400 higher education textbook titles published by Nelson, Canada's largest educational publisher.
But when the pandemic arrived, Top Hat's top brass realized new opportunities were emerging. Prior to COVID-19, Top Hat offered a package of tools geared for both in-class and online learning. “Our customers used Top Hat to move from a sage-on-the-stage teaching model to an active learning pedagogy that engages students before, during, and after class,” explains Silagadze.
As schools began entering lockdown, Top Hat's remote learning features took on new importance.
“Schools had to figure out how to transition a largely in-person class experience to remote or online environments overnight, a process that created tremendous challenges and uncertainty for administrators, faculty, and students,” says Silagadze, adding that these institutions “also faced increased challenges with making education accessible, and with combating student loneliness and isolation.”
Prior to the pandemic, 85 per cent of Top Hat's student users were using the platform in traditional class settings. The pandemic effectively flipped this statistic on its head.
“COVID-19 provided the opportunity — and the business imperative — to expand our value proposition to online and hybrid courses,” says Silagadze.
His team spent three months completely rebuilding the platform with an aim to having a pandemic-ready solution available for clients come the fall term, focusing on the addition of features and functionality — such as purpose-built classroom streaming, online discussions, and remote proctored virtual tests — designed to help students learn wherever they happen to be.
Top Hat has also accelerated its hiring schedule, adding more engineers to allow for faster iterations as the needs of universities and colleges continue to evolve quickly.
The calculus, as Silagadze sees it, is simple. “The pandemic has put even more of a premium on teaching. Without a campus with clubs, sports teams, and other frills, the only thing a college has left to demonstrate its value is the quality of its instruction.”
In other words, if schools want to maintain their enrolment and educational prestige, they need to prove to their students that the education they receive is worth the cost of tuition. And that's where Top Hat is proving more valuable than ever.
The real test, though, will be whether Top Hat can keep this momentum once the pandemic is over.
“Our goal is to ensure educators and institutions are fully equipped to confidently deliver effective learning experiences to students, regardless of whether they are taught in-class, online, or through a hybrid combination of both modalities,” he says.
There has been some backlash and complaints from students on remote learning, and many are longing for the day they can return to campus. A poll by McGill University earlier this year noted that while an overwhelming number of students appreciated the flexibility of remote learning, a vast majority had difficulty focusing and paying attention, wanted help to stay motivated and experienced personal stress.
However, according to Top Hat's own research, half of the teachers they work with intend to keep using online elements within their courses even when it's safe to go back to in-person teaching.
“Online asynchronous and blended formats will continue to be relevant because of the flexibility they provide to instructors and their students,” says Silagadze. “We're confident about increased adoption based on an ongoing and growing need for student engagement and belonging.”