For years, teachers and professors have struggled with suppressing the use of cellphones in classrooms. As the phones got smarter, students got more absorbed, and the fight against distracton grew only more challenging as laptops and tablets became ubiquitous, too.
Going with the flow instead of against it is software company
Top Hat Monocle, which was started—fittingly—by two students as a graduate project. Described as a "classroom response system," Top Hat provides instructors with a suite of tools they can use both during class and after to make learning more interactive, and provide students with real-time feedback. A professor can use it, for instance, to administer a quiz at the end of a lecture, and both she and her students could see the results instantaneously, while still in class together.
Top Hat formally launched in 2010, and secured its first found of financing—$1.5 million—in November 2011. Last week it announced a major new round of funding: $8 million, drawn from several venture capital investors. The significant influx will help the company accomplish two key goals, says chief revenue officer Andrew D'Souza.
"One, we're really hoping to expand the functionality and increase the interactivity." (One such expansion: in the fall the company will be adding the capacity to "turn your in-class experience into a competetive type game," where students challenge each other to test their familiarity with course material.) Second, says D'Souza, the financing will "really drive the sales and marketing." More precisely, the aim is to grow from a current base of 200,000 users to one million users in the next two years.
Top Hat currently has 35 staff, and is now hiring at the rate of 2 to 3 positions a week; the target is to hit 80 staff in total by year's end. The majority of those positions will be at the company's home base here in Toronto, where they do product development and are hiring "aggressively," particularly on the engineering side. The company also has a distributed sales team, and a small office in San Francisco; staffing in those operations will be growing as well.
Writer: Hamutal Dotan
Source: Andrew D'Souza, Chief Revenue Officer, Top Hat Monocle