Top Hat is our centrally-supported student response system.  During 2018, OSU's first year of campus-wide adoption, over 250 faculty & GTAs used Top Hat Classroom for formative assessment of 15,000 students in more than 300 courses! In 2020-2021, during the year of remote teaching, nearly 17,000 students and 268 professors have engaged with Top Hat. 

Formatting Improvements

Instructors can apply bold, italic, superscript and subscript formatting to text in the question stem and answer options for all question types, and also have access to a symbol keyboard. All users are expected to have access by mid-November. 

Virtual Classroom Termination

Virtual Classroom will be shut down on 1/5/2022. Please use Zoom for online lectures. If you have used TH Virtual Classroom in the past year, you should also receive an email communication from TH. 

Hybrid Attendance

Instructors can now configure their attendance settings for hybrid classes. When enabled, the hybrid attendance setting will attach a question to each attendance session run in the course, asking students to specify whether they are attending the class in person. Find out more about this feature here.

Lifetime Textbook Access

Students will have lifetime access to TH textbooks even after the course is concluded. The access is read-only after the conclusion of the course. 

Content Editing

Instructors can resize images on a page or test. This allows better display for students.  Instructors can also edit PPT slides directly from TopHat, however, changes made using this method are only saved in the TH environment. A download of the updated PPT from TH will not include the changes made in TH, but instructors will save the original copy of the PPT. However, a direct copy of the PPT from one TH course to another TH course will keep the changes in the new course. 

New Question Preview 

 A 'question preview' panel is available when creating a new Top Hat question. You can view the question from the students’ view, and can check that it’s displaying as intended.