Smarthinking by Pearson
Software Alternative

Smarthinking by Pearson vs QuadC Student Success Software

Smarthinking

Are you looking for a Smarthinking by Pearson
alternative software solution?

QuadC: an excellent Smarthinking by Pearson alternative for student success

Like Smarthinking by Pearson, QuadC.io is a student success software that offers a subscription service for outsourcing tutors. Higher education institutions can purchase a set amount of tutoring hours each year, providing their students with access to a pool of tutors as they need.

QuadC’s innovative approach involves utilizing a vast network of 5000-10000 outsourced tutors through QuadC’s sister company, TutorOcean, to provide this service, ensuring that our clients have access to a wealth of expertise. All tutors are vetted, are available in a variety of languages, and are available 24/7. Furthermore, we are proud to share that the majority of our tutors are located in North America, whereas many Smarthinking tutors are primarily located abroad. Another unique feature that makes QuadC a superior option for schools is that purchased tutoring hours roll over from year to year, whereas with Smarthinking if you don’t use your hours… you lose your hours.

In addition to outsourced tutor solutions, we also offer the option of using QuadC for peer tutoring and student success services so you can maximize your options. This offers a comprehensive approach to student support.

By leveraging both QuadC and TutorOcean, we can provide a unique solution that addresses the need for peer support and a backup option for outsourced tutors if peer support is not available or insufficient. This allows us to deliver exceptional value to our clients, helping students succeed and reach their full potential.

QuadC (partnered with TutorOcean as needed) is a solution intended to support all facets of higher education beyond the classroom. Compared to Smarthinking by Pearson, when using QuadC, your student groups and academic support teams will have a far more holistic solution to help students access a great support solution to improve student retention, tutor engagement, track information, focus on communication, and help students succeed. Our software was designed with a student’s user experience in mind and with a priority on easy adaptability for all users. 

Your students, peer tutors (or supplemental instructors, advisors, mentors, or coaches) and administrators will all be able to easily navigate and access the platform. QuadC allows schools to achieve seamless and pain-free integrations for all facets of their school’s technology: Brightspace, Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, Ellucian, Banner, Colleague, Salesforce, Zoom, and MS Teams. QuadC consolidates all student services so that they are accessible virtually and in-person, uniting all services across all campuses which allows for enhanced engagement, inclusion, equity, fluency, communication, collaboration, and actionable data insights for schools to identify what is working. Similarly, from scheduling to our proprietary virtual classroom, academic support centers can easily manage all their service offerings including advising, mentoring, assignment help, student enrollment, accessibility support, workshops, drop-in centers, and much more.

A straightforward software comparison:

We made the chart below to help illustrate how QuadC is an excellent alternative to Smarthinking if your faculty wants to offer outsourced tutoring with the option to provide peer tutoring. Schools partnering with QuadC will have greater success expanding their services to serve more than just individual students needing tutoring.

From the information provided below, it’s clear to see that Smarthinking by Pearson is a good solution for schools that are exclusively interested in supporting their individual tutoring and some basic writing centre needs, but it is not a good option for holistic student success outcomes. If higher education schools want to offer improved tutoring services and have student success software to help with growth, confidence, retention and program completion, they should prioritize making their learning and tutoring centre more accessible both ‘irl’ and virtually. Higher education admin professionals need to take all of their roadblocks into account and find a technology that helps clear the path to student success, so they can create systems that free up their time to interact with students as opposed to managing spreadsheets and timetables.

For schools using Smarthinking who are looking to continue offering outsourced tutoring while improving student success and enhancing support across the entire student lifecycle, we would encourage them to consider other student success technologies (such as QuadC) which would offer advanced reporting, demonstrate program effectiveness, and prioritize supporting students’ academic performance. Higher education institution faculty and staff shouldn’t have to compromise on how they communicate with students, track student progress statistics, and offer effective support and retention solutions for student success in order to offer conveniently outsourced tutoring

  FEATURES QUADC Smarthinking by Pearson
INTEGRATIONS Can easily integrate with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and WebEx Integrates with Zoom and Bluejeans, but not MSTeams and Web Ex
Student Information System
Learning Management System
CONFIGURATION (APPLICABLE FOR MULTIPLE SUB SERVICES) Ability to manage and configure individual workflows for multiple sub services (eg.Tutoring, Writing support, SI, Advising, Coaching, Mentoring). Not limited to just one service
VIDEO CONFERENCING FEATURES Video conferencing with audio, video, and text chat, a shared whiteboard, and drawing and math tools There is internal whiteboard and video and chat feature, but they are not used and they are unintuitive. Schools that use Smarthinking may need to use zoom also as the Smarthinking whiteboard is possibly unreliable and clunky
Ability to teach and practice coding with in the whiteboard
One to many video sessions
Both asynchronous and synchronous document editing in the video conferencing
An included eTutoring module with file upload, written response, and email response tools with a dedicated slot-based schedule interface
Access to video recordings of previous tutoring sessions
STEAM friendly teaching tool
EARLY ALERTS Manually triggered
Automated triggers, case management, assign cases to multiple teams, single source of truth for student info
ADMIN FEATURES/FUNCTION Scheduling flexibly operated by self-serve or staff managed
Easily configured single-sign-on and LDAP authentication capabilities
Tracking attendance of students and tutors
No-show policy tracking, notifications, and enforcement
Designed to support advising
Designed to support writing center
Designed to support tutoring
Designed to support counseling
Designed to support supplemental instruction
REPORTING FEATURES Customizable reports with charts, graphs, and statistics which eliminate the need for manual data entry
Can easily export data into CSV files to share
STUDENT FEATURES/FUNCTIONS Instant messaging feature between hosts and students and adminstrators
Can easily search for services or tutors in a social media inspired interface
Support online sessions
Support in-person sessions
Can see a log of all past, current, and upcoming sessions (ie. advising or tutoring)
Customer tech support Minimal
Daily live seminars for tech support for training and ease of use
Allows schools to consolidate multiple programs and services
New features and updates are installed automatically and without any additional costs
What’s Smarthinking by Pearson?

For over twenty years, Smarthinking by Pearson has been helping writing centers including scheduling management to enable writing and student support services. While Smarthinking is certainly an inexpensive choice for some institutions, we strongly believe that there is so much more to operations in Academic Support beyond just simply scheduling.

Smarthinking is a web-based tutoring software designed to enhance student outcomes for higher education administrators by facilitating and managing tutorial scheduling and appointments. It allows students to schedule, conduct, and document online appointments, as well as provides a range of tools and resources for tutors to use during consultations.

Some positive assets of Smarthinking by Pearson include:

Convenience and flexibility to support students, as they can schedule and conduct appointments online

Increased accessibility for students who may have difficulty coming to campus for in-person consultations. This can help empower at risk students, first generation students, and create accessibility for different student demographics.

Some tools and resources for tutors to use during consultations, such as text annotation and screen sharing.

It has been said that the 24/7 access to tutors can be helpful.

Some negative assets of Smarthinking by Pearson for student support include:

Limited face-to-face interaction between student and tutor. This limitation can take away from the student experience and student engagement during sessions.

Possible technical difficulties with the platform. Customer support and student support is very important for the user satisfaction of a software. Technical difficulties can limit collaboration and communication and prevent effective support. With QuadC, there is no room for technical difficulties and we have a support team ready and waiting to help any student, tutor, or staff member who may need assistance.

Limited opportunities for group work or in-class  activities. This also means that Smarthinking by Pearson doesn’t offer features such as early alerts, case management, workflow solutions, or deeper insight and customizable reporting for actionable insights with student information.

Furthermore, If a program isn’t known for its privacy and data security, it can create massive challenges and negatively affect student enrolment or retention if the students don’t feel that their data is safe.

Caters almost exclusively towards online tutoring, so when colleges and universities try to use the program for in-person tutoring or advising for student success, they are left unsatisfied

Student Retention and Student Outcomes: QuadC Offers More

We believe that this chart speaks for itself and explains why QuadC is becoming the preferred choice of higher-ed institutions for student success to help them better manage their data, insights and academic tutoring programs.

Are you currently using Smarthinking? Are you looking at upgrading your online student services?
Click the button below to connect with a QuadC expert to learn more and see the product in action. We'd love to meet you!

Interested in more student success technology comparisons with charts?

TutorTrac vs. QuadC

Penji App vs. QuadC

Upswing vs. QuadC

Accudemia vs. QuadC

EAB Navigate vs. QuadC

Why QuadC is the preferred solution for your tutoring programs


QuadC has been built with the latest cloud-based, micro-services architecture. This means we can help our clients quickly roll out additional features and custom workflows to help meet their ever-growing needs.
Why QuadC

QuadC by the Numbers

100,000

Students Served

115,000

Sessions Deliverd

6,000

Assignments Reviewed

Student retention is a challenge for educational institutions.

That's why ensuring students show up for supplemental learning support is so important.

QuadC connects students with all their available services, both online and in-person. Integrated asynchronous and synchronous technology enables effective communication and collaboration between administrators, professors, advisors, mentors, coaches and students.

Why QuadC for Tutoring and Writing Centers?

Student Friendly Interface

Students love the ease and simplicity in navigating available services and finding the right resources to connect with.

Scheduling Simplified

Students, advisors and administrators all love the flexibility and ease of use to handle self-bookings by each role.

In-Person, Online, Drop-Ins

Regardless in how your offer services, QuadC is flexible enough to ensure the software won't be limiting your centers' success.

Impact Reporting

You and your team work so hard, let's make sure your efforts can be easily measured and showcased to help build the case on why you need more resources..

Collaborative Virtual Rooms

Of course we integrate with Zoom, Microsoft Teams and WebEx. But when you need a more tailored virtual classroom to connect resources in a meaningful way we have you covered!


Don't just take our word...

QuadC’s adamant about their product; they are pushing something awesome. More than that was their willingness to work with us to customize the product. Phenomenal!

QuadC is formatted in a way that’s familiar to our students. They can chat with Tutors like they would on Facebook. It’s a better user experience!

It has been a pleasure working with you and the entire QuadC team to help the University of Pittsburg implement its new Academic Support model. I would rate all of you a 10 for your responsiveness and willingness to adjust the platform and accommodate our different use cases.

Simple, affordable pricing for a fully customizable solution
that can even integrates with your other campus tools!