Our company, Smarthinking, is growing up. We’re no longer a young start-up — we’ve grown through adolescence and as we near adulthood we have become part of something much bigger. Let me explain…

In 1999 Smarthinking was founded on the idea that utilizing the Internet to aggregate a workforce of highly skilled educators would allow students anywhere in the world to get high quality on-demand academic help at a reasonable price. Over the years, the Smarthinking service has grown to become the premier academic support service for higher education, with study after study showing its effectiveness for students at all levels of achievement. As we continued to grow, we added new subjects: nursing and allied health, computers and technology, among others. We expanded our reporting features and made it easier for students to access the service through integration with the spectrum of LMSs. We improved our metrics and stabilized our wait times and turnaround times to achieve highest levels of student and faculty satisfaction. With these foundations, Smarthinking is the industry standard for online tutoring.

With students in over 1,000 institutions using Smarthinking, along with ongoing research showing effectiveness in student performance, many large education companies began to take interest in our success. These companies were interested in integrating Smarthinking with their products and services to offer superior solutions for education. One company saw so much potential that they decided to make us part of their organization. In February, 2011 Smarthinking became part of the Pearson family. In that moment, Smarthinking graduated from a small start-up to becoming part of the world’s leading education company.

The wealth of knowledge and experience at Pearson opens up new ways for Smarthinking to help students across all levels of achievement in K12 and higher education. Our access to resources, especially technology development, will improve and expand our ability to deliver our services in ways that proactively anticipate trends in teaching and learning and student and faculty activity. We are on our way to adulthood and it’s going to be an exciting journey.

Chuck Kleiner, Ed.D., Chief Sales & Marketing Officer, Smarthinking