Wooclap

A new centrally supported, in-class electronic voting system is being made available at the University to replace Top Hat. Wooclap was the clear winner among four evaluated systems in a recent procurement exercise and will be the only centrally supported voting system from academic year 2023-24 onwards. 

Why Change?

We have a legal duty to check the market to ensure that any tool we use is fit for purpose and value for money. In addition, while Top Hat has been popular in some areas, it was seen by many as overly complicated and cumbersome. Top Hat as a platform has been evolving over time and moving away from a simple voting tool to a more complete learning platform and was no longer the best fit for a significant number of users at Edinburgh. 

• The introduction of Wooclap will bring a more user friendly interface and presenters will have more control over their events: 
• You can choose from three levels of participant access: anonymous; self-identified; logged in. 
• There is no need for students to create accounts to join and participate in an event. 
• Participants access a Wooclap event via a QR code or a customisable short URL. 
• There are 15 question types to choose from. 
• You can share events with colleagues or collaborate on a single event. 

Availability and Access

There is a LTI connector for Wooclap available in Learn. This can be used to sync scores or attendance in Wooclap events with the Learn Gradebook. Please see our SharePoint page for full details on how to use Wooclap with Learn.

Wooclap Learn LTI

However, Wooclap is available to use as a standalone tool now and is available to everyone with a University account. Details on how to sign into the system are detailed on our help site.

Wooclap: Getting Started

Training

Two training sessions are ongoing and available for staff to book via People & Money.

Introduction to Wooclap (1.5 hour – offered monthly):

This session is aimed at novice users of voting systems and will give some background on using voting systems in general as well as Wooclap in particular. 

In-Class Polling for Student Interaction and Engagement (1 hour – offered monthly):

This session is aimed at any user of voting systems looking to develop their use beyond multiple choice questions and knowledge checking. It will include some techniques that can be used to encourage peer and class discussion.

In the runup to semester 1 2024, an additional session was run aimed at experienced users of Top Hat/Mentimeter and was intended to quickly get users up to speed on creating and presenting events in Wooclap.  NOTE: This orientation session is no longer being offered. However, slides highlighting the topics covered, with notes, are available from the Digital Skills Documents Catalogue: Wooclap Orientation. A set of videos covering the same content are available on our SharePoint site: Wooclap Orientation Videos.

In addition, we are happy to arrange local in-person sessions for Schools, programmes, or courses. Let us know via IS Helpline if you would like to arrange a session locally.

Migration of Content 

Migration of content has now closed. Access to Top Hat has now been removed for staff at Edinburgh.

Support 

We have created an initial set of support materials to get you started with Wooclap. These can be found on our SharePoint pages. These articles will be added to as use of Wooclap develops at the University. 

Wooclap SharePoint