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I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learn

by jskopek 16y ago

I'm a developer at Top Hat Monocle. Were you in the UW System Design course last term? We had a couple of courses that had issues with monocleCAT, and we learnt a lot from them. One of the biggest issues that caught us by surprise was the effect a room full of connected students can have on a lower-quality access point. We learnt from that, and totally rewrote our synchronization code to be much more robust and efficient with bandwidth (something I'd love to write a post about some time in the future). We used to be hosted on Google App Engine, and we suffered greatly from dowtime issues that plagued every App Engine site all throughout the term. We learned from that and switched to Amazon EC2, where we've built a backend that automatically scales up to thousands of simulatanous connections. We discovered that while most users have laptops or netbooks, few users like lugging them to every class. We learned from that and introduced iPhone and Android applications, as well as enhancing our SMS submission system to send back confirmation messages (with an easy opt-out process) for students on legacy phones. We discovered that some professors had teaching styles that didn't take advantage of our software, so we've started being more agressive in our professor approval process, as well as introduced training sessions to help professors get a feel for how to incorproate the system in their lectures. The biggest lesson we've learned is to find early adopters that are willing to work with you to improve your product, and to build strong relationships with them. Our product has improved monumentally in the last few months thanks to their support. We've signed on a number of new professors in the Engineering department at the University of Waterloo, so it's quite likely you'll be using monocleCAT again next term. In recognition of the issues some students experienced last term, we'll be giving vouchers for a free term to students in the courses that had serious issues (you'll probably be seeing yours in the mail in a few weeks). ------------- EDIT: when I say we had a couple bad courses... the System Design course was the one that really had issues (hence my guess).

icegreentea 16y ago
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!
- CamperBob 16y ago
  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.
grails4life 16y ago
Please have the speaker in the demo SLOW DOWN. It was hard to keep up with her as she showed off the software.

by jskopek 16y ago

icegreentea 16y ago

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!

CamperBob 16y ago
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.

grails4life 16y ago

Please have the speaker in the demo SLOW DOWN. It was hard to keep up with her as she showed off the software.