[uiri]

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.

[noxToken]

>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.

[axiom]

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/

[coldpie]

> 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?

[throwaway729]

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.

[uiri]

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]

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)?