Category: Top Hat News

As the year draws to a close, we are once again excited to celebrate your commitment to equitable, personalized and AI-rich learning. We’re thrilled to unveil this year’s Top Hat Graded: our annual report that looks at how you and your students used our engagement platform and Ace, our AI-powered teaching and learning assistant, to your advantage. Let’s dive in.

Giving new meaning to student engagement

Click on target. Multiple choice. Fill-in-the-blank. It’s clear you wanted to shake up the standardized quiz this year. We’re honored to be along for the ride! You created more than 9.6 million multiple choice questions and 1.7 million long answer questions this year. But that’s not all. You also designed more than 985,000 fill-in-the-blank questions using our interactive platform. Our engaging formative assessment questions helped students stay focused before, during and after class when tackling their homework. Simply put, more questions posed meant more reason for students to complete their readings and attend class.

We also recognize that a good debate or small group discussion can help students shape their understanding of a new topic. While Gen Z might call it a vibe check, we’re filing this under your commitment to giving every student an equal voice. You created more than 509,000 discussions this year—interspersed within your lectures, readings and assignments. In turn, more than 147,000 discussions were used by students to assess their comprehension along the way.

Harnessing AI for good in the higher ed classroom

Artificial intelligence has, once again, been a hot topic in higher education. This past year, you viewed Ace under a refreshing light. More than 50,100 students relied on Ace for course-specific study assistance and AI-powered practice quizzes. In turn, learners also received immediate feedback rooted in the context of their course to guide their future studying efforts.

Now, let’s turn to you. More than 1,500 of your fellow faculty members used Ace this past year. Educators especially valued being able to add AI-generated questions into their slides using our Lecture Enhancer feature. Not only do our AI-powered features for educators save time during the question creation stage, Ace generates hints and explanations that allow students to identify their own misconceptions. Even better, we’ve charted a 182 percent increase in Ace usage among professors since our 2023 summary—speaking to the benefit of incorporating AI into the classroom.

Using Ace to spark active learning and higher-order thinking

Once again, you found a way to assess student comprehension without the extra time commitment. You created more than 30,400 questions using Ace’s Lecture Enhancer. Whether you wanted to drill into students’ understanding of mitosis in your biology course or Victorian architecture in your art history class, Ace offered tailored questions in response to the context of your material. Faculty also designed more than 9,200 questions using Top Hat Pages. That meant students were given yet another opportunity to assess their learning during textbook readings and homework.

We thank you for your investment in AI-powered, active learning for every student. We wish you a successful start to the new semester!