Top Hat Monocle Transforms Tech From Classroom Distraction into Teaching Tool

Name: Top Hat Monocle

Quick Pitch: Transform tablets and smartphones from classroom distractions into teaching tools.

Genius Idea: Top Hat Monocle lets college students use smartphones, tablets and laptops instead of traditional classroom response systems to engage with their professor’s lectures.

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If Top Hat Monocle has its way, teachers won’t yell at students for taking out their cellphones in class â€" they’ll encourage it.

The Toronto-based startup is rethinking the way students engage with teachers during college lectures by replacing so-called “clickers” â€" the remote-control response systems used in classrooms â€" with web-based applications that work on students’ smartphones, feature phones, tablets and laptops.

Professors who opt to incorporate the service into their classrooms can develop interactive quizzes, surveys, discussions and other features, and encourage students to engage with these presentations through their mobile devices.

Mike Silagadze, the company’s CEO and co-founder, came up with the idea for Top Hat Monocle while studying engineering in college. “The lecture experience wasn’t very engaging, and didn’t add a lot of value,” he tells Mashable.

As a result, Silagadze says attendance typically dropped by 20% to 30% by mid-term. “That’s pretty disastrous if you think about the amount of energy and time that goes into preparing for the lectures by the professors and by the schools preparing equipment for it.”

Silagadze developed an application to help boost engagement while still in school, officially launching Top Hat Monocle in late 2010. Since then, the service has been used by teachers in nearly 200 universities worldwide (mostly in the United States and Canada); Silagadze expects to reach 200,000 students by the end of this year.

Top Hat Monocle raised $8 million in a round of funding from Emergence Capital Partners, iNovia Capital and other companies this summer, on top of $1.5 million it raised in a previous seed round last November. The startup has put that money to work, growing its staff and customer support side, and expanding its presence in new markets. Top Hat Monocle recently opened an office in Australia, and Silagadze hopes to expand into the U.K and Europe next.

The educational tool is free for teachers, but the company makes money from students, who pay $20 a semester for a subscription to the service if they choose to use it. Top Hat Monocle generated $1.2 million in revenue during the 2011-12 school year, and expects to generate about $4 million in revenue this academic year.

Top Hat Monocle isn’t the only tool trying to integrate mobile devices into the classroom in a positive way. Socrative, for example, offers a similar service that lets classrooms use smartphones and laptops in place of traditional classroom response systems. But Top Hat Monocle’s healthy funding and wide range of sophisticated features put it well in front of its competitors.

In addition to its other interactive features, Top Hat Monocle recently launched its first-ever cross-campus tournament that lets classrooms compete against each other on interactive quizzes. The first tournament took place earlier this month between the University of Waterloo and the University of Toronto, and others are planned between Stanford and Berkeley, as well as Harvard and MIT. This endeavor will further boost engagement around learning, and also has the potential to provide data comparisons for students in different schools â€" a potentially useful service in its own right.