Pearson awards Excelsior’s Darren Walsh with national online learning excellence award

by | January 6th, 2020

Excelsior’s Darren Walsh, assistant vice president of learning and academic support services, was recognized with an online learning excellence award by Pearson at the 16th annual Cite Online Learning Conference, held yesterday in Jacksonville, Florida.

The awards are divided into two categories: K-12 and higher education — Excellence in Online Administration and Excellence in Online Teaching. As part of Pearson’s commitment to inspire and support excellence in online education that drives student success, the company will donate $1,500 to the scholarship fund of each winner’s choice.

In the announcement, Pearson describes Walsh’s achievements:

Darren Walsh is the technical developer and administrator of a new, highly innovative and completely open-source online writing lab, the Excelsior College OWL (OWL). Under his leadership, the OWL is highly innovative, offering the first-of-its-kind writing support in an open-source environment, one that is designed to respond to the writing crisis in the United States. The EC OWL is unique because it was built from scratch to provide seamlessly integrated multimedia content, and it can be used for free by students, faculty, and programs throughout the world. A national study involving six colleges and 152 students found that students using the OWL in their courses scored 6.6 points higher for their final grades compared to students not learning with the online lab. Walsh is an innovator beyond this new resource as well. In his position he oversees the development of a wide variety of online student resources, including a student orientation, library, career center, bookstore, online student success guide, and integrated online tutoring into the course design process.

Review the full release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2016/02/prweb13206959.htm