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

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-15/top-hat-raises-22-5-million-to-go-after-pearson-mcgraw-hill

by axiom • 9 years ago

255 159 9 years ago

mabbo2• 9 years ago

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.

Panini_Jones3• 9 years ago

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

brutus1213• 9 years ago

Toronto seriously needs better tech employers :'(

stephanos2k• 9 years ago

how so?

fastftw• 9 years ago

- 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 quite high.

To highlight some extraneous comments regarding mentorship, it should be known that the teams are sized to about 5-8 people, with a team lead & product manager facilitating each team. Bi-weekly one-on-one's are in place to catch up with your respective lead and talk about your experience thus far, goals for the future, and really providing a basis of mentorship and growth. Higher ups such as the VP's are always accessible throughout the day to chat; we're pretty open.

If you have further questions, feel free to comment below and I'll get back to you ASAP! ^^

danielhooper• 9 years ago

I called them out on this in one of the Who's Hiring posts they always comment on. This seems like a reallllyyyy obvious problem for them...

pyre2• 9 years ago

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

3pt14159• 9 years ago

I haven't heard great things about working there over the years.

libovness• 9 years ago

what are some of the other more interesting companies/startups in Toronto?

ptmstart2• 9 years ago

I would say Wealthsimple.

throwawayosiu18• 9 years ago

Shopify seems interesting.

There really are not that many tech companies in Toronto (and that are hiring unless you have 5+ yrs of experience).

Either 1. you have very very early stage startups (that expect you to work for free till they get funded),

2. funded startups that have a short runaway and expect you to work like crazy till they get to the next round of funding (during an interview with a fintech startup - it was mentioned that they expected me to work for ~12+ hrs / day but I'd still get paid for only 8 hrs. But when they scaled up, I'd be "rewarded" for my hustle, grit and commitment".

3. Big companies (Google, Mozilla, etc.) who are looking for quite a lot of devs but seem to be insanely picky about hiring them.

To add to this, there seem to be a lot of devs than jobs (or that companies can go for long without hiring for those open roles).

JabavuAdams2• 9 years ago

Games: * Ubisoft * Rockstar Toronto * UKen * Big Viking Games * Gameloft * Torn Banner Studios * Get Set Games * Drinkbox Studios * Capybara Games * Sago Sago * Metanet Software * Zynga Toronto

hobonumber1• 9 years ago

SoundHound is doing really well in Toronto. I work there. We just raised $75M Series D and got featured on FastCompany as one of the best AI companies in the world. We are hiring a lot of engineers.

todazar• 9 years ago

I'm at CanadaStays - one of the biggest in vacation rentals in the great white north.

sobes2• 9 years ago

Nulogy.

zhwrd• 9 years ago

I work in engineering at https://unata.com based in downtown Toronto. We are a digital shopping saas platform for grocery retailers and we currently work with about 10 mid size grocery chains across US and Canada.

Last year we were named one of Deloitte’s Top 50 Fastest Growing Canadian Companies and CIX’s Top 20 Most Innovative Canadian Companies. Check us out!

cholantesh2• 9 years ago

Anecdotally: Wave, Flipp, and Wealthsimple come highly reviewed from some acquaintances.

pyre2• 9 years ago

I went through the interview process with them several years ago (when they were still called Top Hat Monocle). I basically got very positive feedback from the interview process, until I had to interview with the CEO. Apparently the reason given by the CEO for torpedoing me was that I didn't have enough projects on my Github account so I didn't "love the web" enough.

Take from that what you will about their attitude towards hiring (taking into account that this was 3+ years ago). That said, I haven't met anyone from Top Hat that I personally had a bad opinion of.

surge• 9 years ago

Seriously? Not every project can be in a public repo, are all their projects on open repos? Some of us host our own or use different sites because we've been using git longer than github. Also, love the "web". It's called the Internet, are you a tech CEO or not? I love how critical they are because you didn't conform to their specific idea of how coders share their code and communicate. Someone can be pro open source, and have lots of projects ongoing but host their own gitlab, IRC server, etc, they share with their community or started long before github was a thing.

I also can't imagine someone whose in this field that doesn't "love the web". Github is good, but it's not the only way to do it.

nemild• 9 years ago

The other thing to be aware is that the rationalization may be different than the reality of why he didn't choose you. The CEO may have found this an easier way to reject you.

In YC, there was this saying (in the context of VCs): believe the rejection, but not the reason. There's little upside in being honest.

wahnfrieden2• 9 years ago

Hi, I'm Alex, on the engineering team @ Top Hat.

I can't speak for back then (I joined after the Top Hat rename), but I'd like to clear up our current practices. We definitely appreciate when candidates have projects or code publicly visible, but understand that not everyone hones their craft through open-source work for one reason or another and would not hold it against someone if their coding contributions weren't public.

c2h5oh• 9 years ago

You are lucky - you could have been hired. It's a horrible place to work -I've got first hand experience.

axiom4• 9 years ago

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

eth0up2• 9 years ago

Maybe not the suggestion you're looking for, but I'll take the opportunity to vent.

First and foremost, don't arbitrarily block Linux users for web interfaces. McGraw Hill does, or did in the past and so do others. I spent hours contacting their useless support and playing politics with the college to get this changed, to no avail. At first, I could simply change my useragent and sneak in, with everything working well enough. When they 'smartened up' (or whatever) a bit, they effectively kept me out thereafter. This was a very nasty and persistent problem for me and one I won't forget.

Also, I never once found McGraw Hill software helpful. It seemed a cheap, shameful way to employ 'professors' otherwise too inept and uncreative to manage their own coursework and classes. At the undergraduate level, many colleges are becoming odious rackets (by my observations). McGraw Hill et al are indispensable allies here. Be different, be effective, be honest about education. Real education isn't a gravy train.

JosefStoolen• 9 years ago

I am a current undergraduate student using TopHat software. My professor stated that he was unable to typeface using Latex for the class notes. This should be a feature if it hasn't been updated already.

Additionally, at my school there is a centralized online interface for professors and students to post notes, quizzes, updates about the course, grades, forum discussions etc. Myself and many students were upset when we had to pay for a 'premium' service which offered no features outside what was offered for free in all our other classes.

All I can say is in order for TopHat to impress STEM students they will have to be very creative in the features that they offer. Though they are sometimes liked by professors, interfaces like TopHat and McGraw-Hill/Pearson are almost universally seen as a rip off by students. Access to propriety notes isn't a feature when very few students pay for any textbooks in their STEM subjects.

SpaceRaccoon• 9 years ago

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 to no standard, with atrocious equation rendering and a terrible interface.

He ended up uploading our assignments to TopHat as PDFs but since it doesn't support PDF-viewing we just download those as zip files anyway. Our in-house service supports PDF-viewing in browser, along with powerpoint and other formats.

Not really sure why TopHat exists besides a way to gouge more money out of us students if we want to be enrolled in a course. I could get by without my professor's poor excuse for a textbook, but I would lose 5% immediately if I couldn't participate in the silly attendance system, and more for the online quizzes (although we could use our in-house system to the same effect) so I have no choice but to fork the money over straight to my professor's pocket. As if my 15k tuition wasn't already enough.

omouse5• 9 years ago

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.

djsumdog• 9 years ago

Sucks because I'd like to see real disruption in the text book industry. It's like trying to compete against Wal-Mart .. I still shop at Target/Kroger/et. al, but I realize they now employ a lot of the same supply chain practices Wal-Mart started just to stay competitive.

So it makes me wonder if Top Hat, claiming to be disruptive and different, is or will eventually employee questionable practices just like the current industry.

jtchang• 9 years ago

Really good to know. I wonder if there is a site that actually lets you post reviews of interviews from companies. Glassdoor I guess is one but I'd be curious about culture as well.

throwawayosiu18• 9 years ago

A friend of mine was selected for a Support Role (that too, a temp one).

They had him and a bunch of other come in on the same day, and write a 16 page exam.

From what I understand, my friend didn't like the atmosphere and was already overqualified so he accepted another position.

But this left a bad taste in my mouth about their hiring practices - but then again, if they are continuing with this, it probably means that it works for them.

omouse5• 9 years ago

What was on the 16pg exam? that sounds ridiculous!

AlexC04• 9 years ago

I never went through the "full process" at TopHat - but I've been impressed with the interactions I've had. As a former teacher, now an engineer I thought they'd be a really great fit.

The one time I reached out to them though, I called it off before we could move forward because I got a promotion, raise and change of role (all of which I was specifically looking for).

I don't know much about the culture - but my understanding is that they've got good compensation & a reasonable work life balance. (EDIT: wow, reading the other comments here, my understanding may have been WAY off)

Actually taking on the textbook publishing industry would be a really big deal IMO. I could imagine a few really interesting disruptions there. Tablet versions of all textbooks via a "netflix" type model?

Maybe like $250/year for access at the university level rather than $600 for that one totally esoteric 30 page title on the mating habits of the African fruit fly.

Students save over the cost of all books, and the edge-titles get brought up.

Maybe that's a bit too Pollyanna an idea. I'm sure there would be an amazing volume-market if you did it at the high-school level.

One digital subscription account, all textbooks. No defacing, no lugging heavy books, access anywhere, always up to date.

If pages and sections were PDF exportable with low-impact DRM it really could be revolutionary.

canistr2• 9 years ago

+1 to the reputation of Top Hat amongst Toronto devs. Everyone I know is avoiding the place like the plague. Regardless of the salaries touted on places like StackOverflow Jobs.

tempVariable• 9 years ago

Same here, in 2012. I talked with who I remember is one of the founders. I believe there were already in Toronto or in the process of moving from the Waterloo area.

It was very bad as far as whole process was concerned. I didn't mind though since they were in their infancy and I moved onto a different position anyway.

georgee3• 9 years ago

I can't speak to the process in 2012, but I assure you we have a very mature, modern agile process in place now.

lhorie2• 9 years ago

I applied directly a few years ago (prompted from an ad at stack overflow), and response times were pretty reasonable.

The interviewing process itself was somewhat time-intensive for a Toronto company (it had a do-at-home assignment, which is fairly uncommon in TO), but other than that it was a fairly average experience.

Ultimately I turned down their offer, because their offer was low (and going from the who-is-hiring threads, it still is lower than market averages)

With that said, I got a chance to talk to some of the developers, and the work-life balance seemed reasonable (although not as good as, say, working at CGI)

gabbo2• 9 years ago

May I ask where you chose to go instead? I don't see much which is exciting in Toronto (bad money, uninteresting tech).

dbg31415• 9 years ago

Recruiting is an imperfect endeavor.

That whole "85% personality, 15% skill" saying really applies here.

I've seen great developers get frustrated that they have to talk to a junior HR rep for their first screen and say things that were way over her head, or just flat out rude. (Not saying you were, or intentionally were at any rate.)

HR / Recruiters really piss me off too... I was working at a company as a contractor, helping to build their in-house dev team and transition them away from using contractors. I sent them one of the best devs I knew, and a great guy who had worked on very similar tech stack to boot. He didn't even make it to round 2.

His version: Well, the HR screener was 15 minutes late calling me, then wasted another 10 minutes asking questions about the wrong role -- an accounting role instead of a dev role. About the 4th accounting question in, I realized what was wrong and asked her if she was reading off the right question list. We got if fixed up, but she seemed really embarrassed.

Her version: He wouldn't have been a good fit for our company culture.

Total shame, but what can you do? The screener gets all the power in that situation... we trust her because we hired her, but she's clearly in a position where if she makes a mistake and doesn't want to own up to it... she can just sweep it under the rug. She has a bad day... wants to take it out on a candidate, what are you going to do about it? Her knowledge of tech is 100% limited to what sounds like a good answer relative to other answers other candidates have given her.

Culture fit, and the human side is important... probably a safe bet in most situations that if you can't talk with the bubbly 22 year-old recent college grad, you probably will have communication issues with others too. All you can do is be kind, move on to round 2 and hope you eventually get to talk to someone in your specialty smart enough to know how to actually rate your talent. =P

andrew_wc_brown• 9 years ago

Toronto startup hire culture is really sad even today.

I interviewed at Top Hat 3+ years ago and I remember their hiring process was sad because it was a FizzBuzz test under conditions that were setup for me to fail.

I wasn't allowed to use my own laptop, editor of choice, or language of choice to complete the test. They wouldn't tell me what conditions they wanted eg. do they want test code?

I had to do the test on their computer, in javascript, no internet.

They said I was slow. Well you should have let me use MacVim and I would shown how slow you are in TextMate.

They said I didn't write test code. They wouldn't tell me, and they wouldn't even look at mass bodies of work of production apps where I had tons of test code I written with CI.

wahnfrieden2• 9 years ago

Hey, I'm Alex @ Top Hat, in engineering

Sorry to hear you had an awful experience like that. We definitely want to provide a better candidate experience than that.

As I mentioned before in this thread I can't speak for interviews that long ago, but these days we have a standard process: we want to see you in your element, so you're encouraged to use your own machine and whatever tools and languages you're best at. We also currently do a pairing-style mini-project where you're free to look things up - Google has become another essential tool for devs, so we want to avoid forcing people into unnatural ways of working that won't reflect their actual abilities in an interview.

bfirsh• 9 years ago

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?

619deathstar• 9 years ago

Opening links in a new tab with the target="_blank" attribute in your <a> html tag? Keeps the user on the main site in a different tab, and when they close out the new tabs page, they are kicked back into the original site.

mcbits• 9 years ago

Warning: Always add rel="noopener noreferrer" if you use target="_blank". Otherwise the target site could redirect the main site to a phishing page or worse.

wmil• 9 years ago

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.

swiley• 9 years ago

I didn't like tophat because it brought computers into the classroom where they don't belong.

But anything that attacks person is honestly probably a good thing, they seem to be actively hostile to students.

markrusciano• 9 years ago

I used Top Hat last semester at Iowa State University and the mobile app was excellent. Unfortunately, many of our projectors' are still 1280x1024 which resulted in some of the UI and text of the professor's web-app being cut off.

Still worlds better than anything else I've used and very moderately priced.

uiri2• 9 years ago

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 it for free; a lawyer's time isn't worth it and I'm sure they spent more than $5 of support personnel time on it. Charging software engineering students like this is a great way to poison the well for recruitment efforts down the road.

The second anecdote is a guest lecturer, who apparently had questions already set up in the system, was completely and utterly unable to figure out the UI. He abandoned TopHat entirely in favour of a show of hands.

axiom4• 9 years ago

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/

coldpie4• 9 years ago

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

$60 plus a "subscription," whatever that is.

I can't speak for the quality of the books, but searching "general chemistry" on half.com gives me a bunch of entries in the $5-30 range. They're a few years old, but I can't imagine general chemistry has had many radical changes in the past decade.

These textbooks work with Linux or any other operating system. They can be re-sold, probably for the same price at which they were purchased. There is no learning curve to using a textbook. The textbook's servers will never be down. The university has to pay no licensing fee to the textbook. Textbooks do not have technical glitches. I can read a textbook on the bus, on a plane, in a car, or anywhere, with no worries about running out of batteries or losing my network connection.

Why on Earth would I ever pay more than twice the price for a far worse user experience?

uiri2• 9 years ago

If you're providing electronic resources, then your competition isn't a $200 paper textbook. Your competition is all the free resources available online, including the PDF versions of most textbooks. There is no money to be made in this market except by conning University administrators.

Content on your platform is reliant on charging each student for it, while these free resources can easily be shared by a Prof with the class, between students in the save class, by the student associations (similar to exam databases) or from upper year to lower year students.

akoster• 9 years ago

I noticed the first marketplace link refers to a freely available textbook on openstax (https://openstax.org/). What is the advantage for me as a student or professor accessing this content through your site when I can download a PDF directly from the source (the openstax site)?

throwaway7293• 9 years ago

Public speaking is a fantastic example of a course that doesn't need a textbook at all.

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.

noxToken• 9 years ago

Having used TopHat in a couple classes circa 2014-2015, the product is pretty bad.

Roughly the same time frame for me. Get attendance with TopHat. Inevitably, it would fail at least one day a week in some way. Responses for questions were always hit and miss on whether your submission was recorded. Thankfully, the professor revealed at the end that he wouldn't focus so much on correctness and more so on participation.

If it's still anything like that, I wouldn't wish that upon anyone. Frantically making pacts with the devil every day hoping that your answers get accepted is rough for an 8AM class.

itchyjunk2• 9 years ago

<rant> 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 about answer format ( 1/2 != 2/4 for example and if its expecting .5 then .5 != 1/2). The professor can add their own content and sometime when my physics professor does it, it's really hard to figure out what the software wants. My calculus class is using "MyOpenMath" which is so much better as a software itself. On top of that it's free. And has a free text book associated with it and my professor decided to use that whole combo, so its great.

I wasn't happy with a software called "TestOut" used for my computer class either but at least it was cheap ($40) compared to Pearson. Maybe I am just poor but price is a big factor for me in these mandatory software the college makes me buy for every other class. I want something that enhances my learning experience, not one that hinders it. Especially when I am wasting good money on education. ^_^ </rant>

axiom4• 9 years ago

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)

throwawaydbdksn2• 9 years ago

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

coldpie4• 9 years ago

Honestly I feel really bad for any student right now. All the universities and even public schools are pushing e-learning stuff, but it's in a really terrible state right now. High prices, all sorts of tech issues, incompatibilities with lots of devices that students actually have. Graduating from college in 2010 or so, I feel like I really dodged a bullet as most coursework could be done on paper and used textbooks could be found cheap (or, frankly, pirated). Nowadays I imagine it's a nightmare trying to navigate all these various e-learning systems on top of just doing the damn work in the first place.

E: This is to say nothing of the professors, underpaid teachers, and unpaid TAs who have to put up with this crap too.

amathprof• 9 years ago

MyOpenMath creator here. Exciting to see a us mentioned, and glad it's working well for you. BTW, the open-source software that runs it is called IMathAS, and is on Github if anyone wants to contribute :)

itchyjunk2• 9 years ago

Ah, bit of a late comment but I had no idea the creator of MOM was around HN. For the other section of the same class, different professor decided to use a paid software which is $120 + the paper back book needed is around $300 new. Trying to go through college when the softwares cost more than $/credit hour is pretty hard.

senior_james• 9 years ago

I think it's great that they are trying to disrupt the textbook industry. However, the industry is so large and the majority of US universities are so entrenched, it's going to be an uphill battle.

There have been many startups that attempted this and all have failed (or the VCs just wanted a payout and were bought for millions when the big publishing companies felt threatened).

It's like trying to disrupt Ticketmaster. You might be able to get a few venues over to your side, but if the artists aren't switching over, you won't get very much traction.

Universities also have no incentive to save money on software. They know that not only is there more of a demand to go to college than the supply of colleges, but that they are guaranteed tuition through the federal loans program.

If we had no federal student loan program, they would be forced to compete on the free market and all of these ridiculous prices for textbooks and software would free fall.

u_wot_m8• 9 years ago

saw an article that in the last 40 years the number of administrators has increased 400% while tenure track professors has only increased 23%. Number of students has increase 300%. They could easily cut costs but the money is there so there's no incentive

These college admins should honestly be charged criminally

_23sd• 9 years ago

With how much adjunctization stands to save universities, I doubt software licenses are even on the radar for administrators. And if you don't want to piss off the tenured faculty while trying to shut down unionization, don't tell them to cut back on the books and software.

If we had no federal student loan program...

Not a silver bullet. How sure are you that private lenders wouldn't fill the void with higher interest loans that people would still be willing to take? There are already examples of more "creative" financing schemes like income sharing, which could certainly expand as well if the more attractive federal loans disappeared. Demand for college degrees stays sky high whatever you do.

jabl• 9 years ago

I do think the textbook industry is ready for disruption, but it won't happen by someone VC funded that essentially just wants the money going to the incumbents to themselves.

The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content. Well, depending on the topic that already exists, but what needs to happen I guess is mainstream mindshare.

A lot of the $$$ in the textbook industry is just air ("Hey, basic math hasn't changed in 100 years and we haven't figured out a better way to tell the story, but anyway lets add a few fluff paragraphs and reshuffle all the exercises so students are forced to buy the new edition").

But TBH, at my university the teaching staff largely disliked the textbook racket too, and came up with their own exercises, thus allowing students to use any edition of the chosen textbook.

That being said, I'm just appalled at the poor quality of many of the textbooks from the major publishers. It's like they're selling by the pound, and thus end up with phonebook sized monsters that spend an amazing amount of pages explaining very little.

throwaway7293• 9 years ago

The disruption I'm expecting to happen is quality CC licensed content

Bingo! But there is still money to be made here.

Bundle a high quality open source textbook with tons of extra examples, auto-graded quizzes/assignments when possible, cheater detection, etc.

Provide regular updates so that Google doesn't know the answers to all the homework assignments/quizzes. Scrape the answers that are provided by google and incorporate them into the cheater detection.

Also provide a bit of analytics on top of the quiz/homework infrastructure. Or at least provide robust excel export so that instructors can figure out if there are clusters of students struggling with this or that concept.

And then sell the bundle and give some kick-back to the author(s) of the open source text (because it's the right thing to do, but also because the authors are thought leaders and will plug your product if they feel you're providing a valuable product at a reasonable price without screwing anyone).

Trying to write better textbooks than seasoned and altruistic professors is a losing battle.

woodruffw• 9 years ago

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.

educanon• 9 years ago

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.

cat199• 9 years ago

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'..

clavalle• 9 years ago

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.

kerhackernews2• 9 years ago

It would be neat if they offered some free textbooks and course materials for certain subjects.

axiom4• 9 years ago

We totally do offer that! :)

throwawayosiu18• 9 years ago

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.

ghettoCoder2• 9 years ago

What's not to get. They're just casting a wide net looking for that special unicorn coder that only appears when the planets align. All other mere mortals are not worthy but they will gladly waste your time until then. I guess they forgot the old adage about interviews are 2 way streets.

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.

koolba2• 9 years ago

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?

spandrew• 9 years ago

I've worked at Top Hat for the last couple years (on the engineering floor) and it's been nothing but positive. Out of all the Toronto-area startups I've worked at in the last 6 or so years Top Hat seemed the most serious about succeeding. And I love the product-space – one I can potentially actually make a difference in. The hiring process was tough, but I didn't think it was unfair.

I worked previously at accounting and marketing experience startups in the area, too. Their products always seemed awkwardly positioned — not silly enough to be fun like Snapchat or solving a serious enough need to be Shopify.

Anyway take that for what you will. Just my 2 cents and thoughts (admittedly biased) on working here the last couple years. They've been some of the most productive ones of my career so far.

wbh13• 9 years ago

Disclosure: I work for a large University (combined residential+online presence of ~100k) and we have contracts with Pearson, McGraw, Cengage, and Top Hat.

Top Hat has been surprisingly enjoyable to work with from a contractual side. They've been accommodating to our needs and worked with us to improve their product -- I'm actually working on a SOW with them right now where they'll be adding new features for us at 0 cost.

Even though we have strategic partnerships with these large publishers, I wouldn't mind seeing them go by the wayside in favor of integrating more of Top Hat's digital content.

throwawaydbdksn2• 9 years ago

Does it bother you that the majority of student see mandatory subscriptions to all of these services as a giant ripoff?

I mean, you could save every student maybe 600 a year if the university purposely used books that are one edition out of date. That's the same as lowering tuition around 5% at most places. Would this really affect the quality of education in any meaningful way?

"Strategic partnership" sounds like another way of saying the university gets some money out of the deal at the expense of their students pocket books.

How is this justified from the position of someone who maintains relationships with these companies?

degenerate• 9 years ago

He works for the university; he's not the one getting ripped off. Top Hat might make his life easier because they have simpler contracts and are nicer when it comes to customization, but in the end the students are still getting hit with the bill. His perspective is irrelevant to the problem. Until the point where colleges have to actively recruit new blood and aren't bursting at the seams with applicants, the kickback partnership between publishers and universities will never go away. It makes way too much sense to stick the student with every bill, because the system knows they will pay it.

wbh13• 9 years ago

I'm not involved in the curriculum development side of things, so I don't have much input into that. And prior to the implementation of Top Hat, our students had all been using physical "clickers" to respond to in-class questions.

However, Top Hat implemented a program where the students could trade in their old clicker and get a 5 year Top Hat subscription. Plus a "Lifetime" Top Hat subscription is cheaper than buying a clicker, so students have seen it as a net win.

We do not receive financial compensation from Cengage, Pearson, or McGraw. The strategic part is that they offer more services to us, let us test new stuff they're toying with, and help our profs develop custom content.

I still take classes, so I definitely feel the hit of these textbook prices. It's also why I've advocated for pushing more towards a "direct integration" method of provide course content in our LMS. Students pay ~$60 for access to the content, instead of $100+ for a textbook. It still adds up, but it's a way to start to lower costs.

(and the prices keep going down. I just found out yesterday that one of our vendors is dropping the price of a range of course content because of high adoption rate)

kerhackernews2• 9 years ago

Well if they can get rid of the $200+ textbooks that you have to buy (and never use) to get web access that would be great. Almost all material in school textbooks can be found online for free, it really makes no sense to require students to spend anything of $20 on coursebooks.

neap24• 9 years ago

I agree that access to information online has lowered the price that people are willing to pay for textbooks (digital or physical). But I still think there's a market for a textbook that essentially organizes all the relevant information for a course and vets it for correctness. This is worth a little more than $20 to me, but definitely not $200.

JabavuAdams2• 9 years ago

I previously worked with their VP Engineering, at Janna Systems. A very, very sharp guy who's been through a couple of startups and exits.

I've heard from a different friend that they're very results oriented w.r.t estimates, etc. It means that they get a lot of stuff done, but there's no time for research or non-approved exploration.

omouse5• 9 years ago

That makes it sound like a ticket-shop; you're treated like a bricklayer rather than a software engineer?

georgee3• 9 years ago

Thanks for the vote of confidence! Like a broadway show, the start of classes is fixed in stone so meeting dates is pretty important to the business.

Good development organizations tailor their methodology to the needs of the business and here at Top Hat the whole company rallies behind the start of classes.

Having a process to meet a date doesn't preclude good engineering. No software engineer wants to be told what to do and how to do it. As a business we are very transparent as to what we want to accomplish and my engineering teams have a lot of leeway on how they want to accomplish it.

jsonne• 9 years ago

It's ambitious and I wish them the best of luck. However, as someone who has worked in the space, they're going to run into a very real problem that the textbook industrial complex maintains its stranglehold because of the very real financial incentives it gives professors etc. Add that in with the fact that content isn't all that expensive to create in the first place, getting students to adopt is expensive, and it's a very noisy marketplace, they're going to have an uphill battle.

mralvar2• 9 years ago

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 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.

HarryHirsch3• 9 years ago

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!

mralvar2• 9 years ago

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.

BeetleB• 9 years ago

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!

Not all publishers. Just those that make trivial, minor changes that prevent you from using used books for classes.

Also, the whole "Let's create a separate text book for each university" thing.

maverick_iceman2• 9 years ago

In November, they launched an online content marketplace, where professors can create course materials and sell it around the world.

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?

jimhefferon2• 9 years ago

I don't know anything about TopHat.

But I'm a professor and I've offered material for free for twenty years. I can think of some very good reasons to prefer this marketplace-thingy from an author's perspective.

1) Exposure. If you want to sell you want to be on the shelves at the local mart.

(And some authors don't want to support the download traffic.)

2) Platform. If what you are offering is guaranteed to work because you produced it according to this vendor's standards then you don't have to field queries about platforms you don't understand. (I offer a straight PDF of a math text. The only twist is that if you click on the question it bounces you to the answer and if you click on the answer it bounces you to the question. I get queries about that.)

In particular, I'm concerned about standards for interactivity. I don't want to code that stuff, I want to write a text. If a vendor provides the widgets and takes a cut of sales, for instance, I'd read their pitch further.

3) Integration. If it all works with some online gradebook that'd be great.

4) Version control. When version 3 comes out, you'd like version 2 to go away.

maverick_iceman2• 9 years ago

Thank you for the response. I understand why authors might find this beneficial but do you think it can outweigh the advantage of being free?

danielford• 9 years ago

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 spaced-repetition software Memrise.

I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market.

cpursley3• 9 years ago

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

prdonahue• 9 years ago

I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market.

Sounds like he's looking for a free solution, not trialware.

aphextron• 9 years ago

I think most of my colleagues will be moved over to open educational resources within fifteen years, and I'm not sure there's long-term profit to be made in this market.

As a student, I'm not sure I agree with this. I think there's a lot of value in having a really well laid out, well designed textbook with good examples and illustrations. Especially in lower division classes where you end up mostly teaching yourself the material from the text anyways. Most of the open courseware I've had to deal with in classes was extremely sub par compared to actual textbooks.

I think if someone could create textbooks at the quality of Pearson in the range of $20-$50 instead of $100-$200, I would be happy to pay for better materials.

georgee3• 9 years ago

I am the VP Engineering at Top Hat. Our biggest goal is to create an environment where talented people love coming in to work every day and enjoy being a part of something great! I think disrupting one of the last old media holdouts is more than a worthy goal.

In the past couple of years we’ve grown our company from under 100 employees to well over 200. All this growth meant rapid, challenging role changes and adaptation and we've had some rough patches. Over the past 18 months, we've had a very low attrition rate in Engineering and I think it reflects the positive experience of the vast majority of our team.

I am sorry some people have had a bad experience interacting with us. I would love to hear any complaints or suggestions, my email is george at tophat dot com

erikpukinskis• 9 years ago

A marketplace where teachers can sell educational content directly to students, so.... The internet?

But with... an entrance fee? The gorilla which eats all schools will have an entrance fee?

brilliantcode• 9 years ago

Does an open source version of Top Hat exists? I think a lot of educational institutions might be interested in a cheaper and more flexible open source alternatives.

RaiO• 9 years ago

I work at Top Hat in the Engineering Department but only joined in the past year. I have heard second hand that things were bad in the past (2+ years ago now) in terms of culture and work/life balance.

Things have been great since I've joined and the exec team is VERY interested in what they can do to make things even better.

Here are a few of my personal observations, both good and bad: - people most often work 10-6 with flexibility and everyone actually uses their vacation and "personal days" - most devs actually break from work at lunch (supplied) to socialize and play board games - you get great visibility into how the company is doing and what other departments are up to - considering we are a company of 200+ people the execs are very accessible and are happy to spend time with you for any questions/concerns you have - all work is extremely team oriented. They care about where people want to go in their careers and several people have been progressively given more senior responsibilities. - the majority (not everyone) is very engaged and excited to be here. - the handful of people who have left in the past couple years all left on good terms and regularly stay in touch and even come out to Engineering events still. There's definitely a sense of community (although I believe this didn't always exist and will be a challenge to keep around as we grow aggressively). - great location (for me) right on the subway downtown Toronto

Bad things: - space is cramped. You get a decent sized standing desk but there's not a lot of breathing room other than that. They've outgrown the space though there are plans in the works to fix this. - there is time allocated for "Engineering" projects but mostly we are very date driven and have an aggressive product delivery schedule. - diversity. It's a top management priority for the next year but historically they've clearly dropped the ball here. There are several people in Engineering very interested in improving diversity.

I am clearly a biased party, actively working here, but I genuinely feel it's a great place build your career. There are very few places this size that are growing ~70-80% YoY continuously, actually making profit, and have great ambitions for the future.

wbh13• 9 years ago

The accessibility to executives is something I've noticed even just working on contracts with Top Hat. I am surprised at the level of engagement that your VPs and C-suite execs have with customers. It certainly makes customers feel cared for.

umutisik• 9 years ago

quote from email:

I know you recently saw a demo of Top Hat in action, and I want to personally make sure you are aware of a brand new promotion we're running!

To further enhance your lecture experience, we are now providing iPad Airs to professors using Top Hat with a total of 75 students or more this upcoming Spring or Summer term.

If this sounds like it's up your alley, simply click the button below!

Happy teaching,

PublicFace• 9 years ago

PDFs are free and all students already know this. The only people who care are the people with a vested interest in selling pointless and useless garbage(textbooks). I didn't pay for my textbooks in school. Nobody should. If it's useful you should copy it and share it with your friends. Software, textbooks, tools, designs, ideas, whatever. Information is free whether you believe it or not. The medium is what you should pay for....but it is not the message.

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

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