Using Top Hat for Student Engagement in a Large Engineering Course

In this session, the CE 373: Introduction to Environmental Engineering (a large, face-to-face undergraduate course) DELTA Grants 16-17' team will discuss why and how Top Hat is being used to engage and interact with students. One of the major instructional challenges for this course was lack of student interaction and engagement and in the past, clickers were used to address student engagement issues; but it was not very effective. Takeaways include: faculty experience and strategies in using Top Hat in the classroom and related student feedback while running the pilot in Spring 2017; demonstration of some common features and usage of Top Hat; and specific information on how to get started, and use TopHat for their own course(s).

At the end of this session, participants will be able to describe how Top Hat was used as a student engagement tool in CE 373: Fundamentals of Environmental Engineering course, explain how Top Hat can be used as an effective teaching tool, list best practices for teaching with Top Hat, demonstrate some common features of this tool and how to apply this in teaching, define how to get started using Top Hat, and locate support and resources.