Biography

Brenda M. Perea, Program Manager Public Interest Technology (PIT-UN) at New America. She assists universities and colleges advance the field of public interest technology to bring a positive impact to communities around the globe. At PIT-UN we focus on academia as one of the places where ideas are born. Through our network of 58 US-based institutions of higher education and 5 international members, we empower PIT students, faculty, and practitioners to achieve their goals. As the former Director of Educational and Workforce Solutions at Credly, she lead educational institutions and companies to understand how to bring digital credentials into their credentails system and how to develop a proficiency framework that allowed all credentails to illuminate workforce skills not apparent in transcripts, degrees, certificates and courses. She successfully led the Colorado Community College System to implement a system-wide workforce driven digital badge initiative, building collaboration between 13 colleges, 39 campuses and Colorado’s leading businesses and industries. She is nationally recognized to mentor digital badge initiatives into developing deeper collaboration with business and industry around workforce skills. Brenda speaks nationally on digital badges and participates in the international Open Recognition Alliance weekly calls and IMS Global workgroups to shape the national conversation on higher education badging, industry and business interest and workforce participant credentialing. She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of New Mexico, and a Master’s of Science degree from Shenandoah University.