OW2con'26

Kelly HOYLAND, Unicon

Kelly Hoyland is Director of Strategic Project Management & Skills Ecosystem Strategy at Unicon, with over 15 years of experience advancing digital credentialing, learning records, and interoperability across higher education and K–12. She focuses on enabling trusted, portable representations of skills and achievements that support individuals across learning and employment ecosystems. Kelly has led cross-sector initiatives with institutions, employers, and technology partners to drive adoption of open standards and scalable credentialing solutions, bringing a collaborative, systems-level perspective to connecting education and workforce outcomes.


Session

06-03
09:50
20min
Moving from Fragmented Records to Portable Futures: Building Open Infrastructure for Learner Credential Transfer
Kelly HOYLAND, Unicon

Millions of learners earn credits yet never receive the credentials they deserve. The barriers are infrastructural: transfer audits are laborious, systems remain siloed, and the communication gap between institutions stubbornly persists.

This session will introduce the Learner Information Framework (LIF), an open source approach to portable, learner-centered records. We treat credential portability as a semantic and trust problem as much as a technical one. We will share emerging use cases, early patterns, and open questions as well as how AI can accelerate data mapping between systems.

Breakout Education, Science and Research
January Breakout Room