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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

#21

Post by woodruffw »

Thanks to the addition of Top Hat by my statistics professor, I'm now registered on at least six functionally similar/equivalent services this semester:

- Top Hat

- GradeScope

- Canvas (UMD rebranded it to "ELMS")

- WebAssign

- Piazza

- The CS department's internal grading/recordkeeping system

I understand the need for competition, and I think that shaking Pearson and McGraw-Hill from their dominant positions is good.

However, I am measurably less 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.

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

#23

Post by axiom »

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)

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

#25

Post by throwawayosiu1 »

Something that annoys me the most about top hat is not the product but the company:

1. almost every month they enter their info for the HN Who's Hiring thread.

2. BUT they don't seem to ever respond apart from something automated about receiving your resume (this is not just from personal experience, I've seen people generally comment about the no real response)

3. They advertise the same position over and over again (mobile developer, backend/frontend/fullstack dev)

and finally to top it all of, I don't think they really care about being called out on this at all.

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

#26

Post by axiom »

uiri wrote: post #12

Having used TopHat in a couple classes circa 2014-2015, the product is pretty bad. It's main use case is, honestly, attendance. Two anecdotes stick out. 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'm the only one who complained to their support enough to get…

You're right that there are still too many profs who use Top Hat for really basic stuff like polls in class and taking attendance - thankfully that's in the minority these days.

Our goal is to get profs to at least take these baby steps to get started and then to swap out their $200 textbook with content on our platform, which would save students a ton of money and create a much better experience in the process.

Here are some representative examples of content that's on the platform:

https://tophat.com/marketplace/openstax/concepts-biology/

https://tophat.com/marketplace/english-composition-i/

https://tophat.com/marketplace/publicspeaking/

https://tophat.com/marketplace/generalchemistry/

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

#27

Post by pg_is_a_butt »

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)

why doesn't the author get ALL of the money their content earns?

without content what good is your distribution platform?

tophat is run by greedy unskilled morons.

you're all idiots.

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

#28

Post by omouse »

mabbo wrote: post #2

As a developer in the Toronto area, I suspect I would be working for Top Hat if their recruiters were better. I've had two or three interactions with them and each time they completely dropped the ball. Extra funding is great, but if they can't hire, they can't use it.

Read through their GlassDoor reviews, it suggests they're an awful company on both the dev and sales side. And that means thatm at this point, their product probably isn't very good because devs keep leaving. Which means it'll be a mountain of technical debt to deal with and of course the inevitable, "omg we must have new features X, Y, and Z".

They're no longer a startup, yet they act like it. If they didn't raise more cash I would suspect that they would be out of business in a few short years.

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

#29

Post by cat199 »

educanon wrote: post #22

I'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.

OpenStax as well.. All great initiatives.

As for the article, I'd assume it is because it is Bloomberg, and so, these things being more nonprofit/altruistically driven, will never be as 'sexy' as a 'market disrupting' company set up to shake things up and create more 'value'..

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

#30

Post by Panini_Jones »

stephanos2k wrote: post #14
Panini_Jones wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

how so?

They have a reputation for being a bad employer for interns (culture/mentorship) and also producing bad software. Apparently, many of the students (not including myself) have actually used the software and not enjoyed the experience.
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