Last year, instructors told us about the challenges they were having preparing for a remote semester. To help educators connect with their students online through video and chat, Top Hat created a Virtual Classroom feature. We learned a lot by working with schools like yours to improve this function over the past 18 months and this experience will certainly guide our future innovation.

But after much deliberation, we have made the decision to shut down Virtual Classroom on January 5, 2022. This means that the video streaming, video recording, and live chat functionality within Top Hat will be disabled for all users on that date. We want to assure you, instructors at your institution will still be able to use Top Hat to teach remotely, in collaboration with another video conferencing tool. We’ll tell you more about this below.

What’s behind this decision?

Ultimately, this decision was driven by input from our customers: many institutions now have agreements with video tool providers, and many of our instructors tell us they’ve been successfully using Top Hat with tools like Zoom or Teams. We’re here to help educators at your institution do the same. The past year has also shown us that there are other, better ways that Top Hat can support remote teaching and learning. By winding down Virtual Classroom, we’ll be able to sharpen our focus on helping educators bring more flexibility to their courses in this uncertain time. These innovations will help us have a bigger impact on teaching and learning and better serve all of our customers.

We’re here to help

We will be reaching out to professors who have actively used Virtual Classroom to help them use Top Hat with another video tool. We will share with them information on how to use Top Hat with some of the most popular video streaming and recording tools available, and how to save recordings files.

Read more about using Top Hat with a video conferencing solution in this blog post.

The innovation continues: join us on the journey

We’ve learned a lot this year. Your input is more important than ever so that we can keep pace with your needs as remote and hybrid learning continue to evolve. If you have any questions or concerns please reach out to your Top Hat representative or reply directly to this email.

Thanks,
The Top Hat Team