[Recap] Key Insights from Our Webinar: Mastering the Art of Hands-on Labs with Instruqt, Gamification, and AI

Isovalent’s The World of Cilium, powered by Instruqt, sets the gold standard for a technical training program centered around hands-on labs. With over 30+ meticulously crafted labs, thousands of earned badges, and tens of thousands of track completions, The World of Cilium exemplifies excellence in gamification, content distribution, and course authoring.

We recently (and virtually) sat down with Raphaël Pinson, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Isovalent (now part of Cisco), and the visionary behind The World of Cilium to get a behind-the-scenes perspective on how it all came together.  

Here's a recap of the key takeaways.

Meet the Speakers

• Tyler Crumpler, Director, Demand Marketing at Instruqt‍
• Raphaël Pinson, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer at Isovalent (now part of Cisco)

Webinar Agenda

• About Isovalent
• The Evolution of Isovalent Labs
• Strategies to Implement Gamification
• Framework for Extending Existing Content
• Best Practices for Course Authoring at Scale
• Live Demo
• Q&A

About Isovalent 

‍Isovalent (acquired by Cisco in December 2023) pioneered Cilium and co-created eBPF, focusing on networking and security. Isovalent continues to advance networking and runtime security projects, leveraging eBPF for safe kernel programming. Their technology has become critical in securing and managing complex network environments, particularly within Kubernetes.‍

Headquartered in Mountain View, California, the company was initially backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Google, and Cisco Investments before the acquisition. It is the choice of leading global organizations, including Adobe, AWS, Capital One, Datadog, GitLab, and Google.

The Evolution of Isovalent Labs

The Isovalent library of labs has grown significantly since 2021, expanding from two to 33 labs by 2024. Starting with only 150 plays, the labs now boast nearly 70,000 cumulative plays and have issued more than 12,000 badges total. This expansion reflects interest and engagement in Cilium’s features and integrations. The labs were initially designed to demonstrate complex features of Cilium, and over time, they have incorporated gamification, automation, and extensive user feedback to improve the learning experience.

Strategies to Implement Gamification

The creation of The World of Cilium map was driven by the need to organize and enhance the learning experience for users engaging with Isovalent’s growing library of labs. As the number of labs expanded from just a few in 2021 to 33 by 2024, it became increasingly challenging for users to navigate and identify the most relevant content for their specific roles and interests. 

By visualizing the labs as interconnected islands on a map, Isovalent provides users with a clear, engaging way to explore various features of Cilium. The map supports gamification by guiding users along personalized learning paths, encouraging them to complete labs and earn badges. Additionally, Isovalent leverages a daily leaderboard to award prizes, hands out stickers of earned badges at live events, and ties everything together with a bee mascot. This innovative approach makes the learning process both more intuitive and fun.

Framework for Extending Existing Content

Isovalent effectively extends its virtual labs into real-world applications by using them in workshops, conferences, and customer training sessions. The labs play a crucial role at events like KubeCon, providing hands-on experiences to thousands of attendees. The integration of these labs into both virtual and physical events has enhanced Isovalent’s educational outreach, allowing content to remain relevant and up-to-date across various platforms.

Best Practices for Course Authoring at Scale

To manage the extensive library of 33 labs, Isovalent employs a robust CI/CD pipeline, enabling automated testing and deployment. This system ensures all labs are updated with the latest Cilium features to minimize technical debt. The labs are supported by a feedback mechanism that gathers user insights, which are integrated into continuous improvements. The automation process allows Isovalent to maintain quality while scaling content to accommodate growing user demand.

Raphaël leverages AI, specifically ChatGPT, to accelerate and enhance the content creation process for Isovalent Labs. By using tailored prompts, he guides ChatGPT to generate the foundational structure and detailed content for labs, including YAML configurations, markdown instructions, and even creative elements like emojis that help organize and visually distinguish sections. This AI-driven approach allows Raphaël to focus on refining and personalizing the content, ensuring technical accuracy and relevance, while significantly reducing the time spent on routine tasks like syntax correction and scenario development. Integrating AI into the workflow has increased efficiency and allowed Raphaël to maintain a high standard of quality across the rapidly expanding library of labs.

Live Demo

During the live demo, Raphaël showcased several key features of Isovalent Labs, including the dynamic lab map, automated progress tracking, and the use of AI tools in content creation. These features have streamlined the process of maintaining and scaling labs. The demo highlighted the significant improvements in lab usability, with features like automatic badge detection and session restoration that enhance user experience.

Q&A

The audience asked great questions, including: 

• What's a good duration for a lab that you think for seeing people actually finish it?
• What LMS are you integrating with today?"
• How do you really manage the need for repeatable code across tracks? How do you make sure you manage quality with quantity over all of those great things?
• Do you have labs that'll have an ongoing narrative and story today? And are you actually telling a full-on story with these, or is it more of just sequential within your journey of what you need to learn?
• When you're merging a PR for your tracks using a developer workflow, if someone's doing a lab, they would lose their progress. How do you manage and deal with that situation?
• Interested in the part you mentioned about displaying dynamic instructions if someone already has the badge. At what point does that happen? When they click on the lab from the learning path or before the lab actually loads?

Watch the Full Webinar

Curious to learn more? Click here to access the on-demand webinar replay to listen to Raphaël’s answers to the audience questions, view the live demo, and gain additional insights into the best practices outlined above.