Charla S. Long is the Executive Director for the Competency-Based Education Network, a national consortium of higher education institutions and statewide systems seeking to design, develop, and scale new models of student learning. Additionally, she leads a consulting firm dedicated to helping institutions with competency-based learning. During 2015, she served as a consultant to Public Agenda on two significant CBE national landscape and field-building projects, funded by both the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Lumina Foundation. In this role, she provided insights, tools, and support to individuals and institutions seeking to advance competency-based education in the United States. These tools included the CBE Ecosystem Framework, the Shared Design Elements and Emerging Practices Model and Research Report, and the CBExchange conference where hundreds of institutions learned how to build high-quality CBE programs. Prior to this, Long was the founding dean of the College of Professional Studies at Lipscomb University and the creator of their nationally acclaimed competency-based education (CBE) model and badging ecosystem. Long has over 20 years of higher education experience at both public and private institutions in the United States.
