The Open edX® Conference 2026 in Salt Lake City wouldn’t have happened successfully without one partner going above and beyond: Western Governors University (WGU). As our Cornerstone sponsor, WGU didn’t just help host the conference — they helped shape it, support it, and staff it with some of the sharpest voices in learner-first, skills-forward education working today.

We want to take a moment to say thank you.

More Than a Sponsor

WGU has been a mission-aligned organization within the Open edX community for several years, but this conference is where that partnership really showed up in full force. Hosting us in their home city of Salt Lake City, WGU brought the conference to a community steeped in the kind of innovation, collaboration, and opportunity expansion that defines its institutional DNA — and it showed, from the venue to the meaningful programming.

As a Cornerstone sponsor, WGU supported the three-day event—the staffing, keynotes, workshops, Town Hall, and the countless hallway conversations in between. That’s the kind of generosity that keeps a community-driven conference like ours running, and we’re deeply grateful for it.

WGU’s Contribution to the Programming

WGU leaders didn’t just show up — they anchored some of the most talked-about sessions of the event, tackling the hardest questions in AI, credentialing, and skills-based education head-on.

A few sessions worth watching from our WGU presents @ Open edX 2026 playlist:

Continuous Assessment: Embedding Mastery Checks Into Course Pathways — WGU is piloting a model where assessment happens during learning, not after. Using a base of information and knowledge, the team is working to embed mastery checks directly into course pathways. David Perkinson, Senior Vice President, Program Development at WGU, shows how continuous assessment can be structured, what early pilots reveal about the viability of the model, and the opportunities afforded by advancing technologies.

Synthetic Students at Scale, As AI-Simulated Learners — WGU plans to use synthetic students to test courses, assessments, and AI features before real learners are impacted. Rob Clark, Senior Director of Program Experience Strategy at WGU, shows how the team plans to simulate learner behavior, identify bias and design flaws at scale, and integrate automated testing into platform workflows. Attendees leave with a practical framework for safer experimentation in their own environments.

Sovereignty at Scale: Verifiable Credentials, Open LERs, and the Future of Learner Agency — The shift to skills-based hiring makes Learning and Employment Records (LERs) the new global currency. Yet LERs only fulfill their promise of equity and mobility if learners possess true data sovereignty. Taylor Hansen of WGU joins Kerri Lemoie of the DCC credentialing ecosystem to explore the intersection of Open Badges 3.0, W3C Verifiable Credentials, and decentralized identity — diving into the technical and policy frameworks needed to ensure record portability and learner ownership worldwide.

These sessions, alongside the rest of the WGU lineup in the playlist, reflect exactly why WGU’s presence at this conference mattered so much: they brought real, in-production thinking about assessment, AI, and credentials to a community that’s building the infrastructure to support it.

Watch the Full Playlist

If you weren’t able to catch these sessions live, the full set of WGU talks from Open edX Conference 2026 is now available on YouTube:

👉Open edX 2026 Presentations — full playlist

Kudos to WGU

To everyone at WGU who helped make Open edX Conference 2026 possible — from the leaders who filled the agenda with substance, to the team that welcomed us to Salt Lake City — thank you. Partnerships like this are what make the Open edX community stronger every year.

We can’t wait to see what we build together next.