Top Hat Raises $22M to Go After Pearson, McGraw-Hill

I teach biology at a community college and most of the services listed in that article wouldn&#x27;t improve my courses. I&#x27;ve already switched three of my four courses over to open textbooks, which students can download for free or purchase for the cost of printing. I use Openstax for these.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstax.org&#x2F;subjects" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;openstax.org&#x2F;subjects</a><p>For the online learning software, I&#x27;ve also dumped the publisher products and switched to the free spaced-repetition software Memrise.<p>I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I&#x27;m not sure there&#x27;s long-term profit to be made in this market.

I absolutely hated Top Hat during my undergrad. It was just another thing I had to buy that teachers used as an excuse to be lazy because it was ~interactive~. You were so tied to a device for all your classes that if multiple teachers used it it wound up becoming a pain.<p>I noticed it was mostly instructors who taught one-off elective&#x2F;strictly credit classes that used it in almost a punitive way to make sure you paid attention to them.<p>edit - another ironic thing regarding the title of the article, is that the instructors would upload the Pearson, McGraw, etc provided slides with the textbook to tophat.

As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I&#x27;ve had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball.<p>Extra funding is great, but if they can&#x27;t hire, they can&#x27;t use it.

I&#x27;ve worked at Top Hat for the last couple years (on the engineering floor) and it&#x27;s been nothing but positive. Out of all the Toronto-area startups I&#x27;ve worked at in the last 6 or so years Top Hat seemed the most serious about succeeding. And I love the product-space – one I can potentially actually make a difference in. The hiring process was tough, but I didn&#x27;t think it was unfair.<p>I worked previously at accounting and marketing experience startups in the area, too. Their products always seemed awkwardly positioned — not silly enough to be fun like Snapchat or solving a serious enough need to be Shopify.<p>Anyway take that for what you will. Just my 2 cents and thoughts (admittedly biased) on working here the last couple years. They&#x27;ve been some of the most productive ones of my career so far.

I am the VP Engineering at Top Hat. Our biggest goal is to create an environment where talented people love coming in to work every day and enjoy being a part of something great! I think disrupting one of the last old media holdouts is more than a worthy goal.<p>In the past couple of years we’ve grown our company from under 100 employees to well over 200. All this growth meant rapid, challenging role changes and adaptation and we&#x27;ve had some rough patches. Over the past 18 months, we&#x27;ve had a very low attrition rate in Engineering and I think it reflects the positive experience of the vast majority of our team.<p>I am sorry some people have had a bad experience interacting with us. I would love to hear any complaints or suggestions, my email is george at tophat dot com

Disclosure: I work for a large University (combined residential+online presence of ~100k) and we have contracts with Pearson, McGraw, Cengage, and Top Hat.<p>Top Hat has been surprisingly enjoyable to work with from a contractual side. They&#x27;ve been accommodating to our needs and worked with us to improve their product -- I&#x27;m actually working on a SOW with them right now where they&#x27;ll be adding new features for us at 0 cost.<p>Even though we have strategic partnerships with these large publishers, I wouldn&#x27;t mind seeing them go by the wayside in favor of integrating more of Top Hat&#x27;s digital content.

Well if they can get rid of the $200+ textbooks that you have to buy (and never use) to get web access that would be great. Almost all material in school textbooks can be found online for free, it really makes no sense to require students to spend anything of $20 on coursebooks.

It&#x27;s ambitious and I wish them the best of luck. However, as someone who has worked in the space, they&#x27;re going to run into a very real problem that the textbook industrial complex maintains its stranglehold because of the very real financial incentives it gives professors etc. Add that in with the fact that content isn&#x27;t all that expensive to create in the first place, getting students to adopt is expensive, and it&#x27;s a very noisy marketplace, they&#x27;re going to have an uphill battle.

Having used TopHat in a couple classes circa 2014-2015, the product is pretty bad. It&#x27;s main use case is, honestly, attendance. Two anecdotes stick out.<p>The university subsidizes the cost down to $5. Through some technical error, TopHat applied a full discount. One month later, they noticed their mistake and retroactively charged each student $5. I think I&#x27;m the only one who complained to their support enough to get it for free; a lawyer&#x27;s time isn&#x27;t worth it and I&#x27;m sure they spent more than $5 of support personnel time on it. Charging software engineering students like this is a great way to poison the well for recruitment efforts down the road.<p>The second anecdote is a guest lecturer, who apparently had questions already set up in the system, was completely and utterly unable to figure out the UI. He abandoned TopHat entirely in favour of a show of hands.

I didn&#x27;t like tophat because it brought computers into the classroom where they don&#x27;t belong.<p>But anything that attacks person is honestly probably a good thing, they seem to be actively hostile to students.

A marketplace where teachers can sell educational content directly to students, so.... The internet?<p>But with... an entrance fee? The gorilla which eats all schools will have an entrance fee?

&lt;rant&gt; I hate Pearons&#x27; My Lab &amp; Mastering products. It was a nightmare using the mastering chemistry and having a similar experience with Physics currently. I felt that $80 for just the software is over priced because they want you pay another $50 for the e-coursebook.<p>It&#x27;s not that horrible of a software on itself but for that price, i think it&#x27;s bad. It takes a lot of effort to put in the symbols and stuff, its very picky about answer format ( 1&#x2F;2 != 2&#x2F;4 for example and if its expecting .5 then .5 != 1&#x2F;2). The professor can add their own content and sometime when my physics professor does it, it&#x27;s really hard to figure out what the software wants. My calculus class is using &quot;MyOpenMath&quot; which is so much better as a software itself. On top of that it&#x27;s free. And has a free text book associated with it and my professor decided to use that whole combo, so its great.<p>I wasn&#x27;t happy with a software called &quot;TestOut&quot; used for my computer class either but at least it was cheap ($40) compared to Pearson. Maybe I am just poor but price is a big factor for me in these mandatory software the college makes me buy for every other class. I want something that enhances my learning experience, not one that hinders it. Especially when I am wasting good money on education. ^_^ &lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;

I used Top Hat last semester at Iowa State University and the mobile app was excellent. Unfortunately, many of our projectors&#x27; are still 1280x1024 which resulted in some of the UI and text of the professor&#x27;s web-app being cut off.<p>Still worlds better than anything else I&#x27;ve used and very moderately priced.

I work at Top Hat in the Engineering Department but only joined in the past year. I have heard second hand that things were bad in the past (2+ years ago now) in terms of culture and work&#x2F;life balance.<p>Things have been great since I&#x27;ve joined and the exec team is VERY interested in what they can do to make things even better.<p>Here are a few of my personal observations, both good and bad: - people most often work 10-6 with flexibility and everyone actually uses their vacation and &quot;personal days&quot; - most devs actually break from work at lunch (supplied) to socialize and play board games - you get great visibility into how the company is doing and what other departments are up to - considering we are a company of 200+ people the execs are very accessible and are happy to spend time with you for any questions&#x2F;concerns you have - all work is extremely team oriented. They care about where people want to go in their careers and several people have been progressively given more senior responsibilities. - the majority (not everyone) is very engaged and excited to be here. - the handful of people who have left in the past couple years all left on good terms and regularly stay in touch and even come out to Engineering events still. There&#x27;s definitely a sense of community (although I believe this didn&#x27;t always exist and will be a challenge to keep around as we grow aggressively). - great location (for me) right on the subway downtown Toronto<p>Bad things: - space is cramped. You get a decent sized standing desk but there&#x27;s not a lot of breathing room other than that. They&#x27;ve outgrown the space though there are plans in the works to fix this. - there is time allocated for &quot;Engineering&quot; projects but mostly we are very date driven and have an aggressive product delivery schedule. - diversity. It&#x27;s a top management priority for the next year but historically they&#x27;ve clearly dropped the ball here. There are several people in Engineering very interested in improving diversity.<p>I am clearly a biased party, actively working here, but I genuinely feel it&#x27;s a great place build your career. There are very few places this size that are growing ~70-80% YoY continuously, actually making profit, and have great ambitions for the future.

I&#x27;m not sure I understand why coursera and edX are not discussed in this space; as someone who works with higher ed institutions, I see these platforms often adopted to replace traditional publishers.

PDFs are free and all students already know this. The only people who care are the people with a vested interest in selling pointless and useless garbage(textbooks). I didn&#x27;t pay for my textbooks in school. Nobody should. If it&#x27;s useful you should copy it and share it with your friends. Software, textbooks, tools, designs, ideas, whatever. Information is free whether you believe it or not. The medium is what you should pay for....but it is not the message.

quote from email:<p>I know you recently saw a demo of Top Hat in action, and I want to personally make sure you are aware of a brand new promotion we&#x27;re running!<p>To further enhance your lecture experience, we are now providing iPad Airs to professors using Top Hat with a total of 75 students or more this upcoming Spring or Summer term.<p>If this sounds like it&#x27;s up your alley, simply click the button below!<p>Happy teaching,

I previously worked with their VP Engineering, at Janna Systems. A very, very sharp guy who&#x27;s been through a couple of startups and exits.<p>I&#x27;ve heard from a different friend that they&#x27;re very results oriented w.r.t estimates, etc. It means that they get a lot of stuff done, but there&#x27;s no time for research or non-approved exploration.

They need to publish traditional textbooks as well if they are going to compete. Maybe with images and QR codes for the parts where video adds something to the text.<p>If they don&#x27;t then they will be Just Another Multimedia Learning Company.

Something that annoys me the most about top hat is not the product but the company:<p>1. almost every month they enter their info for the HN Who&#x27;s Hiring thread.<p>2. BUT they don&#x27;t seem to ever respond apart from something automated about receiving your resume (this is not just from personal experience, I&#x27;ve seen people generally comment about the no real response)<p>3. They advertise the same position over and over again (mobile developer, backend&#x2F;frontend&#x2F;fullstack dev)<p>and finally to top it all of, I don&#x27;t think they really care about being called out on this at all.

Thanks to the addition of Top Hat by my statistics professor, I&#x27;m now registered on <i>at least</i> six functionally similar&#x2F;equivalent services this semester:<p>- Top Hat<p>- GradeScope<p>- Canvas (UMD rebranded it to &quot;ELMS&quot;)<p>- WebAssign<p>- Piazza<p>- The CS department&#x27;s internal grading&#x2F;recordkeeping system<p>I understand the need for competition, and I think that shaking Pearson and McGraw-Hill from their dominant positions is good.<p>However, I am measurably <i>less</i> productive in the class that requires me to use three of these than the ones that have little-to-no online interaction - devices in lecture are a distraction, automatically graded homework is a frustratingly fuzzy experience, and paying $50+ to multiple third parties to subsidize the workload heaped on my professor by the school feels exploitative all-around.

I think it&#x27;s great that they are trying to disrupt the textbook industry. However, the industry is so large and the majority of US universities are so entrenched, it&#x27;s going to be an uphill battle.<p>There have been many startups that attempted this and all have failed (or the VCs just wanted a payout and were bought for millions when the big publishing companies felt threatened).<p>It&#x27;s like trying to disrupt Ticketmaster. You might be able to get a few venues over to your side, but if the artists aren&#x27;t switching over, you won&#x27;t get very much traction.<p>Universities also have no incentive to save money on software. They know that not only is there more of a demand to go to college than the supply of colleges, but that they are guaranteed tuition through the federal loans program.<p>If we had no federal student loan program, they would be forced to compete on the free market and all of these ridiculous prices for textbooks and software would free fall.

This story has a bunch of internal hyperlinks, but none pointing at the actual product. To save a Google: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tophat.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tophat.com</a><p>An aside: why is news on the web still so bad at this? Presumably because sites are incentivised to not let people leave through an external link? Is there a way to incentivise better linking?

<i>&gt;In November, they launched an online content marketplace, where professors can create course materials and sell it around the world.</i><p>Professors already post a lot of study materials for free on their websites. However, that hasn&#x27;t replaced traditional textbooks. Why this should be any different? Also given all that free course materials why would someone pay for additional materials?

Does an open source version of Top Hat exists? I think a lot of educational institutions might be interested in a cheaper and more flexible open source alternatives.