Yes I was in that class. Thank you for responding.
I understand the the need for early adopters and feedback. I have nothing against your project in principle, and I wish you the best. And I appreciate all the effort you've put into improving the product.
Honestly, I would have no problem with putting up with many of the problems we ran into, just that we paid for it. Part of the problem was that it wasn't explicitly made clear that it was 'beta' software until most of the class had purchased their licenses. Seriously, it completely coloured the way we saw any short comings in Top Hat. A lot of us felt that we were tricked/cheated out and generated a lot of unnecessary ill will. You probably heard through the grapevines some of the rumblings from the class regarding possible financial transactions between your company and our professor.
It wasn't pretty.
On the side, one of the implementation problems that we ran into a lot in tutorials when we ran quizzes was that since we all had laptops, we all had msn open. Which meant that for ~60% of the class, it was just a matter of getting added to an msn convo, and grabbing the answer. I don't really believe there's much of a technical solution that you can implement. In fact, for my class, more than half of the class who actually showed up to tutorial had their laptops there (part of this had to do with our class schedules).
I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.
And much appreciation for the voucher. After reading this, I'll definitely try to look at Top Hat with fresh eyes (and enjoying demos that load on time!). Thanks!
I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.
That's a good point. I occasionally get texts that my GF sent eight to twelve hours earlier... literally enough time to have come from Voyager 2. Confirmation messages are absolutely mandatory in any text-messaging application that matters.
I understand the the need for early adopters and feedback. I have nothing against your project in principle, and I wish you the best. And I appreciate all the effort you've put into improving the product.
Honestly, I would have no problem with putting up with many of the problems we ran into, just that we paid for it. Part of the problem was that it wasn't explicitly made clear that it was 'beta' software until most of the class had purchased their licenses. Seriously, it completely coloured the way we saw any short comings in Top Hat. A lot of us felt that we were tricked/cheated out and generated a lot of unnecessary ill will. You probably heard through the grapevines some of the rumblings from the class regarding possible financial transactions between your company and our professor.
It wasn't pretty.
On the side, one of the implementation problems that we ran into a lot in tutorials when we ran quizzes was that since we all had laptops, we all had msn open. Which meant that for ~60% of the class, it was just a matter of getting added to an msn convo, and grabbing the answer. I don't really believe there's much of a technical solution that you can implement. In fact, for my class, more than half of the class who actually showed up to tutorial had their laptops there (part of this had to do with our class schedules).
I personally was too lazy, and just texted from my phone, and kept thinking that a confirmation msg would be great (I lost a couple of questions from dropped texts no biggie). I'm glad to see that its in place.
And much appreciation for the voucher. After reading this, I'll definitely try to look at Top Hat with fresh eyes (and enjoying demos that load on time!). Thanks!