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

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

#111

Post by withdavidli »

SpaceRaccoon wrote: post #96
axiom wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the founder/CEO of Top Hat I'd love to hear about your experience and what we can do better - my email is mike at tophat dot com Hiring engineers is one of the most important things we need to get right, so I'd hate to think we're doing such a bad job at it. Really sorry that you've had a bad experience with us

My university has a platform very similar to TopHat - assignments, lecture notes, text, quizzes, grades, and all- but for free (or, included). The only reason our Quantum Mechanics prof used TopHat instead was because it gave him the opportunity to gouge an extra $100 out of us for a terrible "textbook" that in any other class would be considered lecture notes, full of errors and typos, proof-read by nobody and held…

I would report that to their department head. I thought teachers assigning their books was a conflict, needing to shell out $100 for crappy notes is a scam.

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

#112

Post by throwawaydbdksn »

axiom wrote: post #23
itchyjunk wrote: post #16

I hate Pearons' My Lab & 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. It's not that horrible of a software on itself but for that price, i think it's bad. It takes a lot of effort to put in the symbols and stuff, its very picky…

Our goal is to put an end to that kind of crap, where publishers charge $100-300 for a text and then gouge students another $50 on top of that for a homework system. Most content on Top Hat is free or around the $20-40 price range, with most of the money going back to the author (vs. publisher model of paying a 5-10% royalty)

Do the professors get paid to use tophat? If so I will avoid them at any cost. What a perverse incentive to take money from students and put it directly into the professors wallet

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

#113

Post by mralvar »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #110
mralvar wrote: post #82

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. I noticed it was mostly instructors who taught one-off elective/strictly credit classes that used it in almost a punitive way to make sure you paid…

Do you really expect an underpaid adjunct not to outsource the grading to the department's textbook company of choice? Adjuncts don't get to pick textbooks. But what's with the griping about textbook publishers? The overreliance on adjuncts allows the university to charge lower tuition and the publishers make the feat possible!

So the cost should be pushed onto me instead? I understand the struggles of adjuncts and grad-students as they were most of my friends in Undergrad because I came into school older. But not one of them used Top Hat or a clone equivalent.

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

#114

Post by wmil »

bfirsh wrote: post #4

This story has a bunch of internal hyperlinks, but none pointing at the actual product. To save a Google: https://tophat.com 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?

One big problem is that links die. Surprisingly often.

So five year old articles will be full of dead links that need to be cleaned up.

Bloomberg obviously doesn't want to deal with that, so the simple fix is to avoid linking to sites you don't control.

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

#115

Post by throwawayosiu1 »

ghettoCoder wrote: post #106
koolba wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These guys don't have a very good rep in Ottawa either. It's not really their fault, it's more of a Canadian business attitude thing. What does " Canadian business attitude " mean? Are you referring to attitude of Canadians toward businesses or their attitude as a Canadian corporation?

The latter. There's a belief that the "labour" should be grateful to the "owner" for a job instead of a looking at it as a straight business exchange of labour for dollars. It runs pretty deep in medium to large businesses and sadly many people tolerate that sort of treatment. Probably a by-product of our colonial days that we've yet to cast off. Although immigration will solve it soon enough.

A lot of Canadians have this attitude too.

A very close friend of mine works for OPG (via a contractor).

OPG and his contractor both have agreed to give him 2 weeks paid time off, and ~ 1 week of sick time off.

However, taking time off ensures that you WILL get laid off (reasons would be made up ofc) during the next quarter.

This basically forces everyone to not take time off (and work during vacations - my friend worked full time during statutory holidays like Christmas and New Year).

When I tried to tell him this was very illegal, he basically said that he was lucky to have his job or he'd be unemployed so he does not mind this.

Now this might be an exception but I've heard and seen numerious stories such as these all over Ontario from various companies (from crappy ones like TCS to startups to small established business like Axiom and even some big multi-national companies - especially in the fintech world and banks).

That said, there are also a lot of companies (like the one I currently work for and the previous company I worked at) that try their best to make sure employees have a great time working there and do their best to achieve that.

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

#116

Post by cpursley »

danielford wrote: post #103

I teach biology at a community college and most of the services listed in that article wouldn't improve my courses. I'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. https://openstax.org/subjects For the online learning software, I've also dumped the publisher products and switched to the free spa…

Check out https://cogenteducation.com/products when you have a chance. We make interactive case studies for biology that go much further than any textbook, digital or otherwise.

We have a free trial: https://cogenteducation.com/trial

full disclosure: I'm a developer there

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

#117

Post by HarryHirsch »

mralvar wrote: post #113
HarryHirsch wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really expect an underpaid adjunct not to outsource the grading to the department's textbook company of choice? Adjuncts don't get to pick textbooks. But what's with the griping about textbook publishers? The overreliance on adjuncts allows the university to charge lower tuition and the publishers make the feat possible!

So the cost should be pushed onto me instead? I understand the struggles of adjuncts and grad-students as they were most of my friends in Undergrad because I came into school older. But not one of them used Top Hat or a clone equivalent.

The cost will continue to be passed on to you until there is a robust discussion about the financing model and the working conditions in academia. If any change is going to happen it's going to come through student effort; despite their protestations the position of the unions and the professors is to preserve the status quo. Back then we'd call this "revolutionary consciousness".

The goals of the students will also need to be taken into account. A colleague gave up giving detailed comments on the lab protocols he graded, the only thing the students were interested in was the grade. My experience matches. It's understandable, at our institution students mostly plump for medical school or associated profession, and it's the grade that counts, not the subject knowledge. The GPA really haunts you.

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

#119

Post by koolba »

throwawayosiu1 wrote: post #115
ghettoCoder wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The latter. There's a belief that the "labour" should be grateful to the "owner" for a job instead of a looking at it as a straight business exchange of labour for dollars. It runs pretty deep in medium to large businesses and sadly many people tolerate that sort of treatment. Probably a by-product of our colonial days that we've yet to cast off. Although immigration will solve it soon enough.

A lot of Canadians have this attitude too. A very close friend of mine works for OPG (via a contractor). OPG and his contractor both have agreed to give him 2 weeks paid time off, and ~ 1 week of sick time off. However, taking time off ensures that you WILL get laid off (reasons would be made up ofc) during the next quarter. This basically forces everyone to not take time off (and work during vacations - my friend wo…

> OPG and his contractor both have agreed to give him 2 weeks paid time off, and ~ 1 week of sick time off.

> However, taking time off ensures that you WILL get laid off (reasons would be made up ofc) during the next quarter.

That's pretty bad though I wonder if it's actually illegal. In the USA most employment is "at will" so companies can fire you for anything or nothing. I'm not sure where taking vacation/sick days counts from a labor law perspective but I wouldn't be surprised if it was within the rights of the company to fire employees who use them.

> This basically forces everyone to not take time off (and work during vacations - my friend worked full time during statutory holidays like Christmas and New Year).

You see this a lot in the finance world as well. Nobody takes vacation during the year and piles it on at the end of the year when things are "change freezese". It's pretty silly.

> Now this might be an exception but I've heard and seen numerious stories such as these all over Ontario from various companies (from crappy ones like TCS to startups to small established business like Axiom and even some big multi-national companies - especially in the fintech world and banks).

> That said, there are also a lot of companies (like the one I currently work for and the previous company I worked at) that try their best to make sure employees have a great time working there and do their best to achieve that.

So how rampant is this though? If it's prevalent throughout Canada then it sounds like a symptom of a jobs gap. If most employers can be picky about picking employees who will skip vacations (again ignoring how stupid this sounds), then I'd argue there aren't many choices for employees to begin with.

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

#120

Post by Panini_Jones »

fastftw wrote: post #50
Panini_Jones wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have a pretty bad reputation among U of T students.

- Current TopHat Full Stack Dev PEY here - I'm not sure what your basis of a bad reputation is, but, I've been working at TopHat for the past 10+ months as part of their engineering team and it's been my favourite internship thus far (I've had 2 previous internships in development). As far as I know, myself and one other UofT student are the first PEY's to have been hired, and our current opinions of the company are…

My negative comments on the reputation of the company come from 3rd hand sources (possibly even more hands). I'm glad you're finding your experience to be fruitful; I will add it as a datapoint to my understanding of the perceived reputation of the company.

Do U of T students like the software TopHat produces?

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