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Top Hat Launches Courseware Online Marketplace for Higher Ed

Top Hat, a company known for its classroom response tools for colleges and universities, earlier this week brought its digital textbook marketplace out of beta.

In the marketplace, now available to Top Hat users at more than 750 colleges and universities, educators can select free or fee-based digital course content. They can also create their own interactive content with text, activities, quizzes, videos, questions, social media feeds and more and share it within the marketplace — earning a portion of the money anytime their materials are used by fellow academics. In addition, educators can collaborate with each other in the marketplace to co-create interactive textbooks and supplementary course materials. They can also act as a peer reviewer, offering others feedback on materials.

A few higher ed institutions started testing out Top Hat's courseware platform last year, according to a news release, and it is now widely available. A professor at the University of Oregon used the platform to co-author an interactive textbook for her geography course with her students, for example. They mined through social media data to design a game that simulates an earthquake and included it in the digital textbook.

The marketplace builds on Top Hat's vision to create a complete teaching platform and fulfills a promise the company made earlier this year to expand its academic content — going head-to-head with textbook publishers. The company aims to give students a low-cost option for purchasing courseware compared to traditional textbooks, the news release said.

To learn more, watch a video overview or visit the marketplace.

About the Author

Sri Ravipati is Web producer for THE Journal and Campus Technology. She can be reached at [email protected].

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