Prof. Elliott Currie

University of Guelph, Accounting BUS 2230

600 students

Elliott Currie uses Top Hat Monocle in his Business 2nd year management accounting course with enrollment of 600 students (all in one section.)

Prof. Currie uses Top Hat Monocle primarily as an in-class tool with questions and interactive demos that students can do on their laptops. However, he also leaves demonstrations active for students to complete after class.

One of the goals prof. Currie had was to improve attendance. Without using a classroom interaction tool attendance typically fell to 35%. With Top Hat Monocle he found attendance steady at 70% or more through the term.

Prof. Currie has also tracked exam performance across several semesters and has found that Top Hat Monocle tends to increase marks by 3-4%.

Prof. Currie was previously a clicker user and decided to switch to Top Hat Monocle because he found students preferred to use their own devices rather than clickers and liked being able to check their participation marks anytime they wanted through the term.

Prof. Kevin Hood

University of Waterloo, Marketing ARBUS 302

80 students

Kevin Hood uses Top Hat Monocle in his Arts and Business 3rd year marketing course.

The way he uses Top Hat Monocle mirrors the way most instructors use clickers. Prof. Hood delivers his lecture and at the end of the class he uses Top Hat Monocle to ask 3-5 multiple choice questions in rapid succession, spending 30-45 seconds on each question.

The goal is to improve content retention. He has found that because students know there is a short quiz at the end of the lecture they are much more likely to be attentive during class.

He assigns 10% of the course mark for participation, and structures it so that if students score more than 75% on in-class participation they get the full 10 marks.

Prof. Hood was a clicker user and was one of the very first professors to try out Top Hat Monocle. His main reason for sticking with Top Hat Monocle was because he found it easier to use and because it had more sophisticated reporting.

Prof. John Thistle

University of Waterloo, Engineering ECE 124

120 students

John Thistle uses Top Hat Monocle in his Engineering 1st year digital design course.

Prof. Thistle doesn’t actually use Top Hat Monocle in the classroom at all. He uses the interactive demonstrations as homework assignments that students must complete before the lecture. He typically assigns 2-3 demonstrations per week from the digital electronics library of demos.

he main goal prof. Thistle had was to get the students engaged with the material and give them a visual aid to understand the abstract content. He found students loved the interactive modules and had one of the highest student satisfaction ratings of any course.

Prof. Thistle has not used any kind of classroom interaction technology previously because he prefers the traditional blackboard style lecture environment. Top Hat Monocle allowed him to introduce interactive learning technology into the course without disrupting his existing teaching style.