Image credit: Julie Uranis, Ph.D., Sr. VP, Online and Strategic Initiatives & Strategic Advisor at UPCEA
By Michelle Mott, ̽»¨Â¥ Consultant, Innovative Credentials Project Manager, Live from Convergence 2025
Reflections from : where over three days, registrars, enrollment professionals, and continuing education leaders gathered to explore the transformative potential of innovative credentials and the collaborative infrastructure needed to make them accessible to all.
The opened with a powerful reminder about the work ahead: higher education must fundamentally rethink how we recognize, document, and communicate learning in ways that serve 21st-century learners and employers. The conference's final session featured Taylor Hansen of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Deb Everhart of Credential Engine, and Darin Hobbs of Western Governors University, moderated by Mike Simmons of ̽»¨Â¥. The discussion delivered on that promise, highlighting Project Infuse, a collaborative initiative that could finally bridge the gap between the innovative credentialing future we envision and the reality that most institutions and learners still experience today.
The Credential Gap We Can No Longer Ignore
The statistics are sobering: fewer than 20% of U.S. institutions currently participate in any form of innovative credentialing, whether that's Comprehensive Learner Records, digital badges, or Learning and Employment Records. For the millions of learners these institutions serve, that means limited access to the portable, skills-based credentials that employers increasingly demand.
As Mike Simmons, Associate Executive Director at ̽»¨Â¥, noted during the session, the pace of growth in digital credentialing has been steady but insufficient. The incremental adoption simply hasn't matched the urgency of workforce needs or the scale of the opportunity. Individual institutions have made impressive strides, particularly those with significant resources. But what about everyone else? What about the community colleges, regional universities, and smaller institutions that serve the majority of American learners?
Enter Project Infuse: Infrastructure for the Public Good
Project Infuse represents a fundamentally different approach to scaling digital credentials. Rather than expecting each institution to build complex technical infrastructure independently, Infuse proposes a collaborative, public-purpose solution: think of it as building the pipes and wires that everyone can connect to.
The name “Infuse” reflects two critical strategies:
Infusing the ecosystem with legacy records: Converting millions of existing transcripts and PDFs into machine-readable, standards-based digital credentials.
Infusing new capability: Leveraging AI and modern technology to unlock value from records that have been sitting in institutional databases for decades.
Project Infuse operates through three interconnected processes:
Ingest: Drawing records from Student Information Systems, PDFs, and other institutional sources, both credit-bearing and non-credit learning.
Infer: Using AI to analyze learning experiences and map them to skills and competencies. AI tools can parse course catalogs and learning outcomes, translating them into structured, machine-actionable data.
Issue: Delivering digital credentials to learners in formats they can use, whether through digital wallets, LERs, or other emerging solutions.
As the Infuse panel emphasized, this isn't about building yet another proprietary platform. It's about connecting the Lego pieces already on the table, bringing together 39 collaborating organizations, including vendors, associations, and institutions, to create interoperable infrastructure based on open standards.
The U.S. Context: Turning Complexity into Strength
Deb Everhart, Chief Strategy Officer at Credential Engine, provided important international context. Many countries already have digital identity systems, standardized wallets, and uniform ways of defining and issuing credentials at the national level.
"In the U.S., it takes longer to pull all of this together because we are a much more distributed marketplace," Everhart acknowledged. But here's the opportunity: "We're actually a much richer and more diverse marketplace. So all of the different things that you all are doing are important in their variety."
The challenge is ensuring that this rich diversity doesn't create insurmountable barriers for learners trying to make sense of their opportunities. "If that variety and richness creates so many blocks to determine how a person makes sense of and takes advantage of their opportunities, that's the problem we're working to solve," Everhart said.
The U.S. doesn't need a single monolithic system. What we need is a common language and interoperable infrastructure that allows our diverse ecosystem to communicate effectively.
Why Employers (and Learners) Should Care
Taylor Hansen, Executive Director of Policy and Programs at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, framed the employer perspective powerfully:
"One of the biggest challenges for skills-based hiring and advancement is signaling of skills. How can employers more effectively signal the skills they're looking for? And how can learners and workers signal the skills they have?"
Right now, employers are already making assertions about what degrees and credentials mean; they're just doing it informally, with limited data. Project Infuse promises to make those inferences more accurate, more precise, and more trustworthy by providing rich, structured data about what learners actually know and can do.
For the 170 million people in the U.S. workforce, this means better opportunities to demonstrate skills gained through courses completed, even if they never finished a degree. For employers navigating skills-based hiring, it means confidence in the credentials they're evaluating.
Reframing ‘Alumni Without Degrees’
One of the session's most powerful moments came when Darin Hobbs, Vice President of Learning & Employment Records at Western Governors University, reframed how we think about students who don't complete degrees:
"These are not dropouts. These are achievers. They just don't know it. We just don't know it."
Through Project Infuse, institutions could retroactively issue credentials for completed coursework, empowering learners who paused their education with tangible proof of skills gained. Imagine reaching back to students who completed five courses before life circumstances required them to stop out, and saying, "Here are the skills you gained while you were here. Here are micro-credentials you've earned. And here's your pathway forward, either to jobs you're now qualified for, or to the next credential that could open even more doors."
This isn't just good for learners, it's a sustainability model for institutions, creating new pathways for re-enrollment and demonstrating ongoing value to alumni.
Standards, Not Silos
During the plenary Q&A, someone asked the inevitable question: "Are we at a with LERs? Will one platform need to dominate?"
The panel's response was unequivocal: we're already past that. The standards exist. They have been shepherded by this community and the open skills movement for years. The question isn't which vendor or platform will win; it's how we create the infrastructure that allows all of them to interoperate.
As Hobbs put it, think of the railroad system. Early trains ran on different gauge tracks and couldn't connect. Then we standardized the gauge, connected the systems, and suddenly trains could go anywhere. "That's what Infuse is really about—just connecting the things that are out there now."
From Hoping to Weaving
Throughout , attendees heard calls to action: move fast, live slow, move together. We discussed data quality, breaking down silos, and the imperative to meet learners where they are. Project Infuse represents the infrastructure that could make all of that possible at scale, described by Hobbs' closing metaphor: "We're all hoping, and we're all doing our part... What Infuse represents now is the loom so that we can begin to weave and create a tapestry."
The Charge Forward
It's imperative that we carry these discussions back to our campuses.
We must advocate for strategic prioritization and adequate resourcing of credentialing work.
We need to cast a wide net to engage partners across our institutions who can advance this work together.
The convergence of registrar and continuing education professionals at this conference represents more than networking; it represents the unique perspectives essential to reshaping higher education. Through continued advocacy and collaboration between ̽»¨Â¥ and UPCEA, we can ensure every learner can access equitable, seamless, and meaningful educational opportunities.
Project Infuse offers an on-ramp to that future:
It's low-cost, based on open standards, and designed for the public good.
It doesn't require institutions to abandon existing systems or vendor relationships; it creates the connective tissue that makes everything work together.
Whether your institution is already deep in digital credentialing or just beginning to explore the possibilities, Project Infuse is designed to meet you where you are.
The LER ecosystem isn't just coming—as the panel emphasized, it's inevitable. The only question is whether we'll build it together, quickly enough to serve the millions of learners who need it now, or whether we'll continue with incremental progress that leaves most institutions and learners behind.
Until Convergence 2026, let's keep these networks strong, these collaborations open, and this vision alive.