Peter Power/The Globe and Mail
While their largest market is North America, Top Hat also has users in the United Kingdom, Australia and Italy.Then the spread of COVID-19 forced institutions around the world to close their doors and open their laptops to deliver courses online. “Some schools were basically trying to deliver that same experience, the sage-on-the-stage-talking-at-you-for-an-hour model of learning, but they’re trying to do that through Zoom or whatever conferencing tool. It was a disaster,” Mr. Silagadze says.
Top Hat provides more than a platform for lectures. It provides post-secondary educators tools to curate their own content for a new generation of digital-native students, including their own digital textbooks with interactive features such as video, assessments, and polling. But she says plenty of research has dispelled the idea that online learning is not as good as in-person.“Just like a face-to-face class, you have to design it well,” Dr. Brett says. “And if you do that, you get good learning and people have good experiences.”
For the immediate future, at least, virtual classrooms will be the only option, Dr. Brett says, and that raises the question of equitable access.“The equity and diversity and inclusion aspect of the online space are very worrying because they parallel what we see in health outcomes,” she says. “You look at particular parts of cities, with lower-than-average incomes, communities of colour, immigrant communities, and they don’t necessarily have the same level of access to technology.