Vonage, a global leader in cloud communications helping businesses accelerate their digital transformation, has been chosen by industry-leading education technology provider Top Hat, to embed programmable video capabilities into its active learning platform for higher education. With the Vonage Video API, Top Hat enables educators to keep students engaged with real-time video lecture streaming and access to recordings of class meetings, facilitating improved connections and learning experiences inside and outside the virtual classroom.

More than three million students are enrolled in courses using Top Hat at 750 of the top 1,000 higher ed institutions in North America. Top Hat enables active learning — a proven student-centered teaching pedagogy that promotes deep understanding, critical thinking, and subject mastery — with interactive content, tools and activities. For use in any classroom setting, whether in-person or virtual, Top Hat empowers educators to deliver effective learning experiences with interactive digital content, assignments, lecture slides, integrated assessment tools, and now, video capabilities – all from a single platform.

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In a recent Top Hat survey of more than 3,400 current higher ed students in the U.S. and Canada, 80 percent of respondents believe that the ability to connect with video for their classes has created a better online learning environment.

“Vonage provided us with the key resources to build and deliver a powerful end-to-end teaching platform that features a rich, embedded video experience,” said Bhavin Shah, Chief Technology Officer for Top Hat. “In a time when educators and students are physically dispersed all over the world, Vonage’s support and expertise has helped to create a solution that enables human connection in learning communities through video.”

A recent Vonage report tracking communications usage before the pandemic and again in August 2020, showed that, as consumers were forced to adapt to the disruption of COVID-19, 39 percent of the 5,000 global consumers surveyed who are currently pursuing education reported higher engagement with education technology tools since the outbreak. Findings also showed that 42 percent of that same group preferred the use of video when engaging with other students and teachers in a virtual classroom.

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“The pandemic has underscored the need for secure and privacy-compliant video offerings, particularly when it comes to providing the remote delivery of vital services like education,” said Omar Javaid, President, API Platform for Vonage. “Now more than ever, students and teachers need virtual or hybrid options that provide a safe, secure and uninterrupted education experience. Leveraging the Vonage Video API to add embedded and secure rich video capability to what is already a robust and intuitive platform, Top Hat is providing the future of education to its students today.”

Vonage’s video has been a worldwide leader in webRTC video solutions since the webRTC standard was established in 2012. With the embedded Video API, Top Hat is enhancing its purpose-built platform for higher education with programmable video tools, as well as controls, roles, and authentication that off-the-shelf video solutions are simply not designed to do.

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