81–90 of 165 posts
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. If they don't then they will be Just Another Multimedia Learning Company.
It would be neat if they offered some free textbooks and course materials for certain subjects.
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 attention to them.
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'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.
what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This reminds me of people calling out DeviantArt several years ago in Who's Hiring posts, and their hiring practices. Which culminated in this blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3061860
What's interesting to me about the discussion in this article is how many people talked about wanting to adopt Google/Amazon's hiring process and how they liked the 7 interviews/whiteboarding way more than take-home assignments. Call me weird, but I prefer the assignments than the mindless discussions about balancing trees and Big-Oh notation.
A well designed take home assignment, meanwhile can be a good filter, telling you immediately if the candidate knows the basics and has the added benefit of showing you strengths and weaknesses in their practice.
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…
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.
what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree it's ridiculous to get to be turned down for that reason at that point. If that was their attitude, they could at least be efficient about it for their own sake and out candidates. But, in general, I think you should consider the other side of the argument. The "problem" is that people without public profiles are competing with people with. And if you're looking at candidates and someone has code online that…
If "It's not that the other person is lazy or "doesn't love the web"." then why is it "reasonable to take that into account?" Those two sentiments seem to contradict each other. The real problem here is that there is now yet another terrible signal being used as a measure of acceptability in the vetting and interview process. "Have some GitHub/GitLab/etc profiles" is in the same category as "give the most personable…
Sorry, it's not at all in the same category, because it's actual output of work. Being able to look at actual code written by the person you're considering hiring is a really great measure of acceptability.
I think we are all agreeing that it's not reasonable to reject someone due to lack of published code. Latch is trying to point out the reality of the situation:
> The "problem" is that people without public profiles are competing with people with.
If you are considering two candidates, who seem more or less equal on every level, but one has an extensive amount of published good quality code and the other does not, it's less risk to hire the one with code.
It's very hard to judge someone's work quality based on personality. I've hired people who seemed good when talking to them but turned out to be not very great developers. I've also hired people who seemed questionable when talking to them, but had decent code samples and/or published code and also turned out to be good or great developers.
I guess to be fair I've never hired anyone who seemed like they'd make a poor developer, had no code samples to prove otherwise, and did badly on coding tests, so maybe I'm missing some great developers who aren't very personable or good under pressure. Frankly I'm okay with that, because I am absolutely positive most of the people in that category are in fact poor developers.
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…
I interacted with communications instructors a lot when I was in university, and literally all of them thought the required textbook was a complete waste. It was there because the department required it, and none of the instructors actually used the text.
Instead they all had their favorite examples of great speeches or debates, and combined that with a few (free) essays on different types of speeches and rhetorical techniques.
But all of the instructors said that the most useful thing they did in the course was just practice. Requiring students to give short speeches in front of (portions of) the class or in front of instructors.
A truly useful platform for public speaking education would consist of recording student speeches and providing a way for peers to provide structured criticism of each others recorded speeches. Perhaps different pre-packaged peer assessment techniques for various types of speeches.
In this and many other cases, I'm very convinced that textbooks serve no purpose outside of accreditation and futile departmental attempts at standardizing ad junct instruction.
Maybe you can get departments/universities to buy into your product, but there's a huge difference between extracting rent from university administrators and actually improving learning. If you have to convince instructors/students to actually use the required instructional material in order to get your cut, you're facing an uphill battle. 99% of students in a public speaking class will either not buy the book in the first place, or else return the book at the instructor's wink-and-nod. And without a truly novel practice speech assessment platform or a very low-priced product, I think that's a good thing.
Professors already post a lot of study materials for free on their websites. However, that hasn't replaced traditional textbooks. Why this should be any different? Also given all that free course materials why would someone pay for additional materials?