Biography

Bill Zobrist is a Vice President and manages all market-facing activities of Smarthinking.com for Pearson Education. He believes tutors can play a vital role in student success and retention when used in a thoughtful manner. Just ask him!

In the past, worked to envision and build educational technology products and strategies. His work includes improving on current e-learning products like Pearson CourseConnect. Also, Bill works on understanding the ebook landscape and how to determine the best solution that fits a customer’s needs. Additionally, he is crafting mobile learning strategies as this is clearly the next big wave to crash ashore. He loves talking about this stuff! Bill is often asked to speak on all manner of digital issues: digital rights management, ebooks, microcontent, learning objects, mobile learning, and mobile devices. Bill began his publishing career in 1989 at Prentice Hall calling on career schools and was named one of the top ten representatives at Prentice Hall for meeting customer’s needs and signing over 15 authors in one year. Bill became an acquisitions editor and published in the engineering and computer science areas at Prentice Hall, Oxford University Press and John Wiley & Sons. While at Wiley, Bill was named Editor of the Year and pioneered on-line study tools for Wiley. Bill returned to Pearson in 2005 as Editorial Director for IBM Press in the Professional Division. When it became clear that Pearson needed to initiate a massive project around content management, Bill joined the effort in 2006 seeing a great opportunity to help transform Pearson’s core business from books to bytes. Bill played a key role in enterprise projects around Global Publishing, Digital Rights Management, The Pearson Strategic Advisory Board, Digital Asset Management, XML Standards, Video Asset Management, The Pearson Asset Library, and Pearson’s new offering eBook+. Bill is a graduate of Bennington College and is about to receive his MBA from Fordham University with a dual degree in Management and Finance. When not spending his spare time with his family, he likes to fly-fish, golf and kayak. Bill would be glad to hear from people at [email protected]