Drawing on his 50 years of experience and the research and interviews that informed his most recent book, “Free-Range Learning in the Digital Age: the Emerging Revolution in College, Career, and Education”(SelectBooks, 2018), Smith will make the case for harnessing the value of all learning — formal and informal, collegiate or non-collegiate — for satisfying both academic and job-related requirements. Smith envisions an end to “knowledge discrimination,” the academic tradition and practice that values where you learned something as more important than how well you know it and can apply it. Ending knowledge discrimination heralds the creation of a new assessment-based and learner-centered ecosystem which has the potential to align worker/learners’ knowledge, skills, and abilities, however and wherever gained, more precisely with employment as well as academic requirements. Learning Objectives: - Better understand the potential for qualitative validation of learning wherever and however gained. -Better understand the social and economic costs of denying workers the value of their knowledge. - Better understand the emerging ecosystem for learning beyond the campus. - Better understand the inevitability of this disruptive change.