See what your Top Hat course looks like as a student - Staff Guide

You may want to preview your course content ahead of making it available to students. You can do this by using a Student Dummy Account, this will allow you to engage with your own tests, quizzes, discussions and polls, as if you are a student, before presenting in a live classroom.

Staff with a Professor account cannot also have a student account, which is why a Student Dummy account is automatically created for each member of staff who creates a Top Hat account – the details of this are sent to you via email within a week of you creating your Top Hat Professor account. If you do not receive your Student Dummy account email please contact Top Hat support for assistance.

How to use your Top Hat Student Dummy Account

1. Before you start, make a note of the join code of the course you want to add the dummy account to. The Join Code is a unique 6 digit code that appears in the top-left hand corner of your Top Hat course.

2. Staff cannot login to a Professor and Student Dummy Account on separate tabs in the same web browser on the same device simultaneously. If you want to log in to a Student Dummy Account in one browser and your Professor account in another, so you can toggle between both as you check your course, open a second browser in incognito mode and use that to log in to the Student Dummy Account.

3. Login to the Top Hat Login page https://app.tophat.com/login or download the app and choose Login.

4. In the School field search for Top Hat University - Demos, the dummy account uses this as the school rather than the University of Leeds.

5. Enter your Student Dummy Account username and password. This will be contained in an email from Top Hat.

6. You will now enrol your Dummy Student onto your Top Hat course. Do this by entering the Join Code of your Top Hat course.

Once you have added your Student Dummy account to a course, you can use your Professor account to present or assign content, and toggle to the browser logged into the Student Dummy account so that you can preview how it would appear to students. If you can, it is good idea to log in to the Student Dummy Account on a mobile device to recreate the student experience.

Note: Students can only see Top Hat content that you are presenting or have assigned to them. You can assign content to individual students or the whole class.

Further Help and Support

You can access help and support from within Top Hat once you are logged in:

Live chat by clicking on the speech bubble icon next to your name, this is available between 2pm to 8pm GMT on weekdays.
Raise a support ticket by clicking on the question mark icon.

Support is also available via the Leeds IT website. Please remember to log in as this will give you additional support options.