All right so very timely obviously as I spoke in the beginning about looking at different models and different credentials and obviously Heather's talk touched on a bunch of things about different types of credentials and models that are formulating so I'm very excited to have this next panel join us on alternative credentials and talking about how they fit into and complement in some ways compete but or but mostly complement degrees and so excited to welcome three great panelists Katie Hall from Corporation for a skilled workforce Jeremiah Schiffler Schifflet from Lord Fairfax Community College and their higher ed.org portal and Stephanie Krause from Jobs for the Future so welcome to them thank you okay Mike's on good to go good afternoon everyone I'm Katie as Jeff mentioned and I'm excited to be here at the Sailor Summit happy to get to know all of you I know many faces in the room from the work I'm about to tell you about and I have two great panelists today Jeremiah and Stephanie and we're going to share some innovations that are underway at each of our respective organizations and just a general perspective on the theme for the conference that we're at this afternoon I think just to start off it's relevant to note that the mission of Sailor Academy is open education to all the theme for this event is looking at the degree and beyond lowering cost increasing access and exploring alternatives in the guiding principle of connecting credentials which is the project I'll use to sort of set the stage for the panel is that all learning counts all learning should count no matter where it's acquired and that's really the guiding principle of our work and so I think those three fit together nicely and I hope that you all will find this discussion interesting today we I think have until about 4.30 so we will save some time for Q&A at the end so feel free to think about questions and write those down as we go it's also worth noting that we had Mike Adams scheduled to be on this panel as well I think he's in some of your materials some of you know mission you and he was not able to attend so these are the three and that's why you don't see Mike up here today that's right we'll just fill the time so I will let Stephanie and Jeremiah introduce themselves in a little more depth when they talk about the work that they're doing and you can of course read their bios in your program I'm here representing connecting credentials which is a Lumina Foundation funded national campaign to transform credentialing in the United States and there is also a tool the beta credentials framework that's associated with the project so I direct communications for connecting credentials and so I'm very hands-on with the campaign part of the work which includes convening work groups around various topic areas collecting co-sponsors to help us host events to help publish thought leadership in credentialing webinars maintaining the website social media crafting messaging for the nationwide platform and I am the communications director for the nonprofit corporation for a skilled workforce which is the lead grantee deploying the work so connecting credentials as I mentioned is Lumina Foundation funded it's a collaborative 116 now co-sponsoring organizations who have signed on and basically said we agree that the credentialing system in the United States is chaotic it needs to be better organized learners don't know which credentials are valuable in which which ones will get them a job in education some are more valuable than others as we know the bachelor's degree is still often the proxy the cut-off for hiring and employers don't know which credentials are valuable they don't know what a credential means someone knows and can do and so that's really the problem that we're attempting to solve some co-sponsors are in the room today University of Maryland University College is a co-sponsor there are several others so we're always happy to see them at events in addition to the co-sponsors there are about 3,500 stakeholders from all over the country that are part of a mailing list that participate in events work groups ads of thought leadership and so we're we're growing we're picking up a lot of energy through the website sharing of resources I encourage you to visit it it will appear later in the slideshow and as I mentioned there is a tool that's also part of connecting credentials and I'll talk very briefly about that later here's the problem statement that I just mentioned why is Lumina funding this work why does the initiative exist in the first place and why does corporation for a skilled workforce care about running an initiative like this so you can read the problem statement for yourself I described it a couple minutes ago and one of our primary objectives is that the system is working better for some people than for others right so vulnerable populations who traditionally don't have as much access don't have as many opportunities to high quality higher education and credentials they're the ones that are hurt the most by the messiness and the credentialing system in the US so this is not only an economic imperative helping better connect people to jobs but it's an equity imperative this just is a visual that we use all the time that gives you a snapshot of sort of the messiness in the credentialing landscape many different kinds of credentials degrees are credentials industry certification certificates credit and non-credit badges and so they're offered by many different types of organizations so navigating different types of credentials and what they all mean can be very confusing very complex this is just an evolution of the project that I think is helpful I always like to point out that in 2013 when the work began Lumina Foundation tasked us with creating a framework that would organize all credentials that were sub degree they already had the degree qualifications profile which listed competencies for associates degree master's degree doctoral degrees and so they were looking to supplement that with something that would organize everything else what we quickly discovered in researching a framework like this was that sub degree is not necessarily the right terminology there are some credentials that are higher level than degrees it for example would map out at a way higher level than an associate's degree in some cases and so sub degree wasn't accurate and we began building our framework as sort of the meta framework on competencies only not leveled by credentials but by competency statements of what someone knows and can do and I so I think that's an interesting evolution and an insight into Lumina Foundation as well in 15 and 16 we moved into a dialogue around credentialing reform in the US and have begun beta testing the tool with 25 community colleges around the country and employers HR departments and now in 2017 and 2018 we're very much moving from dialogue into action full on deploying the campaign convening work groups publishing thought leadership presenting at events so that's sort of the evolution of the work so far these are just the buckets of work the credentials framework the tool is down here in the bottom campaign activities that I mentioned in one block work groups which have been a primary piece of the work convenes several hundred experts around the country and work groups Stephanie Krause actually co-chaired one of our groups last year pathways for equity and so the work groups really helped inform the seminal document of the work the action plan which is on our website and lays out the action steps we think are the priority areas for reform and then the National Summit was the kickoff event in 2015 so that's on there as well here are some of the priority areas the yellow is hard to see I apologize about that these are the areas that the work groups are focusing on that we're writing on that the field has said are the priorities for credentialing reform and making sure that all learning counts as you can see public policy that advances equity common language making sure that employers educators learners are all speaking the same language quality assurance of course open and interoperable data and tech infrastructure aligning supply and demand so those are some of the priority areas I'm gonna very briefly talk about the tool in hopes that you will go to the website and learn about it more for yourselves the framework is basically an eight level reference tool that lists competencies and describes what someone knows and can do so it has knowledge specialized skills personal and social skills the difference between our framework and the 21 international frameworks that we research or some other existing framework in the US is that competencies level across not the credential so for example in Germany a bachelor's degree is always a level five and then you read across for the competency statements here you can take learning outcomes map them against the competency statements in the framework and get a number so a credential maybe a three five seven three in knowledge five and specialized skills seven and personal skills and so the framework then gives you a profile score that can help you communicate what the guts of the credential are so that's essentially a crash course on the beta credentials framework it's on our website you can download and I encourage you to play with it it's being tested right now as I mentioned and the next step is to digitize the framework so we're investigating an algorithm that would live online where profile scores could be stored and we're also looking at app development potentially this is just a snapshot of the framework on our website you can see level two you can see all the other levels as well and you can read in each category what the credential indicates someone knows or can do if they hold it the goal is laid out here in the vision so ideally a better system would look like this all learning would count credentials would be portable transferable transparent we would be building credentialing pathways including ramps that increase access we know that people come in and out of the system at different points of course building a highly competitive skilled workforce is a primary goal and we want it we want to be agile and relevant we know that the labor market often changes more quickly than we do so here in closing for my intro are a few ways to get involved I believe you'll be able to have the slides so you don't have to write all these down right now but website Twitter Corporation for a skilled workforce you can read about some of our other work as well so there are lots of ways to get involved so let's get into the good stuff as I mentioned I'm joined by Stephanie Krause director of special projects for jobs for the future in Jeremiah or Jay Schifflett database administrator Lord Fairfax Community College in higher ed.org so I think I'm going to come over and make it more panel style and I'd ask that both of you just take five to six minutes introduce yourself and your work and your thoughts on on the subject short. Hey, am I working? There we go. I've got a boomy voice in a beer. Steve can you hear in the back? We're all good. Okay. Hey, I'm Jeremiah Schifflett. I'm from Lord Fairfax Community College. At the moment I'm working as part of around four Department of Labor tax grant project that's called Knowledge to Work. And initially what we did was take seven programs in high wage high growth areas that the college offered and we converted them to a direct assessment competency based education version of those programs. And then part of our our larger vision was to take that work and identifying national competency frameworks that stacked and lattice in other credential areas and then all present all of the resources that we had mapped this competencies and put them into this new ecosystem sort of learning self directed learning portal that we've put together called higher ed.org. So just within the narrow bandwidth of information technology, we use the American computing tool and machineries competency framework for both two certificates, CSEs, the higher ed folks, you know, it's a it's a big deal to the specificity. And I guess we'll get into that more when we talk about the term alternative credentials and all that. And then also HIM and so we have a national partner with the HEMA American Health Information Management Association. We're actually working to build a new national credential in health informatics to bridge the gap in HIM between you know the the people doing the health information management work and the IT side of it because you have to have very specific knowledge in those areas. So then we have the HEMA framework and we've layered in a number of their credentials along with our CSE and our associate and then we also have administrative support technology. We have a search engine repository on higher ed.org and we say OER but really it's kind of all sorts of different resources. I mean we have YouTube videos, we have stuff from Khan Academy, we have traditional courses, we have books on Amazon. So we were we spent a lot of time, you know, researching the data elements that drive competency-based education. We were members of IMS Global and we looked at a lot of the work that they were doing and trying to understand, you know, all the moving data points on how to track artifacts relative to competency-based education. And we came to the decision that we needed to present as many different types of resources in as many different learning modes so that we could, you know, satisfy all these different needs. And if you think about it, there's not really a good repository at the moment where you could go and say, hey, I want to go to the commons and I want to, you know, look at sailor courses and I want to see how all of those things might fit together in different frameworks. So, you know, as we move our project forward, as the grant wraps up and we started rolling this thing out on our own, we're, you know, looking for all sorts of people who are interested in this area to come forward with frameworks and competency mappings and, you know, resources, you know, might be your particular courses that you want to have offered in our plural. And then that way we can continue to grow this thing and reduce barriers and that's one of the reasons why we're here. And we like sailor so much is that, you know, we did some usability testing early on and there's just a feeling that people get relative to higher education in general where, you know, some of the words that I remember people saying were, it was like filling out the FAFSA, you know, going through admissions and the college setting is a lot of paperwork and it's confusing. And that in itself is a barrier.  We, we tried to, we, you can use our search engine repositories completely open, you don't have to have an account. But we, we narrowed it down to, I think, seven questions that, that you need in order to create accounts. So, you know, we're trying to just reduce barriers, remove confusion whenever possible to, to enable people to do their own learning. And, and we really see it as, as a, as a bridge, because you, one of the things that, that people run into a lot in, in thinking about higher education is a commitment factor. And so, how, how do you know what you're getting yourself into until you've really got into it and you've started doing some learning? So, this is a great way that people can, with zero risk, as far as money is concerned, to go and look and see what all the educational, you know, milestones are in a career pathway they can explore and sort of evolve their own understanding. And then when they're ready to go to get a credential, they can go to a credential provider or maybe they need more support services and they need to go to a university or institution, you know, and it's all about just leveling the playing field of the mix of all those different things. Great. Thank you. Stephanie. Hi, Stephanie Kraus, Jobs for the Future. I promise panels can be hard. I will struggle to be brief and engaging, if not for you, for me. I moved on Monday and then left my husband, two kids and the dog in a new house and flew to Kansas City yesterday and then here today. And I was doing great until I sat on this chair, which is as comfortable as it looks and sunk down. And so that was our pre- conversation. We weren't actually preparing for the panel but trying to figure out how to have a chair heist and take these with us. So when I'm not thinking about stealing chairs or being exhausted, I'm the director of special projects for Jobs for the Future, which tells you a lot. It's about as descriptive as my previous title of Senior Fellow. But as some of you know in this room, I left practice. I was running an education nonprofit in St. Louis and had run a competency-based high school in the technical college campus. So like Heather, I come out of the K-12 space and the youth development space and left out of this real ethical dilemma that we could get students to complete and get students to be credentialed. But morally and ethically and practically, we weren't assured of their competence and readiness. And it was no longer okay for me as a practitioner or person, frankly, to continue to participate in that kind of system. So I spent the past five years working with a cadre of national organizations, eventually making jobs for the future of my forever home, but not without a stint working with Katie as a campaign director for connecting credentials, trying to really go after two primary questions. The first being, what does it actually take for someone to be ready for the world, for the challenges and opportunities that they may face, for providing for their family and for working and seeking a better life? And then the other part is what then are the systems and structures and conditions that enable every person to get ready? And so at Jobs for the Future, we are embarking in something that we're calling New Horizons, which is really a new vision for the organization. For those of you who are familiar with it, in just recognizing and naming that people go in and out of all kinds of settings and systems in their lives, and that we need to blend and blur the lines between working and learning and education and workforce development and youth development. And while we talk about it, organizationally, historically, Jobs for the Future and all of the other organizations I've worked for are funded within particular systems. And so we're after, as director of special projects, I get the really exciting task of helping to broker and design and develop cross-sector projects. So what that means practically is looking at things like what do we know about the science of learning and student-centered learning, and what does that mean for hiring practices or working with employees? How do we take the energy of the opportunity youth movement rebranded from what we call disconnected youth, which is galvanized new investments and resources, and apply that to efforts to educate and equip uncredentialed adults? What do we do to bridge and broker the competency-based ed worlds of K-12 and higher education? So I think I have the best job ever. And I get to continue to work with my friends at CSW and other places and look forward to talking more. That's great. Thanks for the overview. I have a few questions, of course, but I would say feel free to jump in and ask questions. We're going to make this casual and a discussion as much as possible. But sort of the gorilla in the room is the term alternative credentials, I think, for the three of us. So Stephanie, I'm going to kick this one to you first. And then, Jeremiah, I'd love to hear your perspective as well. What does the term alternative credentials mean to you? Is there a better term? And what's the danger with that term? I know this is close to your heart. It is. Equity issues definitely are. I think not to hijack the panel or the title of the panel, but that we get into a tricky place in putting alternative next to credentials. As I mentioned before, going sort of in earnest after this question of what do we need to be ready? The first thing to name and own is that it's more than credentials. There's some kind of combination of competencies and credentials and also connections that get us ready. And so if we pull back from credentials as sort of this mobility marker, we have to also recognize that there are other things that come up alongside of it. So one of the things that I get concerned about when we talk about sub degrees or alternative credentials is that the power and possibility of smaller forms, newer forms of credentials that are better aligned to workforce needs or where we're headed in the future is that they're nimble and that people truly can be equipped. And they could, in fact, I believe truly close some persistent inequities. And they also could perpetuate those inequities. If they're not connected to quality assurances, if they're not connected to employer buy-in and the right kinds of validation, if credibility and connections don't come with them. So we can take a poor person in an under mobilized community where there are too few opportunities for economic advancement and make that person more competent or give that person an alternative credential and not actually promise the person the kind of economic mobility that he thinks he's getting. And so I think instead if we look at how the credentialing marketplace is evolving and expanding and how the economy and the jobs marketplace is evolving and expanding and how the work that we're doing sits at the confluence and how we're sort of in a new time because of the rapid changes, then the question is not what are alternative credentials, but what are the implication of all forms of credentials in this new world, in this new economy as Heather said, both the emergent ones and the traditional ones and the ones that we don't even know are going to be created. Yep, that's right. And that's one of the things that Stephanie mentioned that we're very conscious of in the connected the connecting credentials project and that Lumina Foundation is very conscious of this danger that you could unintentionally create a second system, your system, right. So, Jeremiah, you had an interesting perspective on sort of the history. For me, I feel like it's more or less unintentional sort of classism that we sort of unnecessarily present to students in, you know, middle school and most circumstances certainly in high school where we present this, you know, you have to get a four year degree. That's the only way that you're going to get your foot in the door. That's the only way that you're going to make it in life and, you know, it's not that it's not good in some circumstances to head for that achievement. But, you know, if you pay attention to, you know, the presentation before us or, you know, you look at bureau labor statistics data, you realize that there is an incredibly growing gap between, you know, high school and four year diplomas where there are, you know, millions of jobs in the next, you know, 10 years that are going to be created in that space where people need very specific education in order to do those jobs and to label them with the word alternative, I feel like does it a disservice and it just adds to that stigma that already exists where, you know, trades and, you know, some of those are the best paying middle class jobs that exist that are very stable over time. I mean, we're always going to need electricians and, you know, those kinds of things.  There's micro, credential, there's nano degree. I mean, why does it have to be so diminutive? You know, what is the, I mean, sure, there are subsets of other things, but, you know, it's like, couldn't we say something positive? You know, if you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics data, they use this term post secondary non degree award. And I think for me personally, if you just took the word non degree out of that, you would probably be getting closer to something that I think is more reasonable. Like, you know, it's post secondary and it's an award. Okay. Now we've got something that everybody can start to feel good about. You know, why can't we add positive words to it? We have to be like micro, nano, pico, something. You know, anyway, that's just my personal feeling. So we probably can't come up with a better term than alternative lives. Or the best kind of panel. Will you speak on alternative credentials? We don't like alternative credentials. Right. We like them, but we're not sure about the language, right? Which is what happens a lot people end up nitpicking the language. So anyway, I think that I think that's a valuable framing and a discussion that has to be had. So in the marketplace where things are getting smaller and more granular, how do learners, students, workers assess credential providers, choose what is most suitable for their path and their employment? And how do employers figure out which providers are most valuable, which credentials are most valuable? So I feel like from the student's perspective, that there's three main points that they should pay attention to. The first one is learner control. Can I get the types of resources in the delivery modes that are going to help me to succeed when I need it on my schedule, on my terms? I mean, that's one of the first and foremost. The second one is going to be portability. If I start down this path but I don't finish it, can I take portions of that somewhere else and does it mean something? And then the final one is the verification. Is there some sort of cache around the verifability of this credential? And I think as long as they're paying attention to those three things, that they're going to get steered in the right direction. So thinking about this question of navigating the credentialing marketplace, I already confessed that I moved on Monday. So let me tell you just a quick little anecdote here. So my husband and I, two kids and a dog, were moving and were moving from a small house to a bigger house. My dad and his wife are also moving. They're moving from a bigger house to a small house. And we both have real estate agents. We sold first. He cannot sell his house, which is a bigger family home. There were five of us at home. And so I think when we consider navigating the space, we have to think about the different generations of learners and workers and their entry points into the marketplace. So for my husband and I, we immediately went online. And the entire experience, including our interactions with the realtor, was via text, online signature, and Zillow. And I even got my data reported to me every day to see how many people were looking at my home and how many had saved it and where were we headed. My dad's realtor is a friend who he grew up with. And it got posted in the local newspaper, which is perfect for my dad, but not perfect for a young family like mine, who I didn't even think about looking in my local newspaper for a new home. So as we consider how we coordinate navigating this very complex, often fragmented space that people are going in and out of, I think that it makes sense for us to think about the various needs for navigating that space. If you are an aging adult learner, or if you are a young millennial or somewhere in between, if you are a first generation students, what are the different needs and access points that are already available to you? I really like, and I so appreciate that UMUC is in the room and others like Thomas Edison, a lot of our folks who are a part of the competency-based education network, we see a lot of the CBE institutions, competency-based ed institutions, who are sort of front runners in rethinking navigational supports and student support services and unpacking them a little bit. Because I think we're realizing that as the higher education landscape is evolving, we need to, as a professional community, become more adaptable and malleable with that. And as the face of today's college student continues to change, we need to mimic that malleability that we've done on the academic end, but now on the student support services end. The discussion that comes up quite a bit in our work groups in multiple different work groups, aligning supply and demand when we have employers on the call, data and technology infrastructure, what's needed in higher education in order to provide services, there's always the discussion of a mix between technology and still needing the high touch and how that will move along a spectrum depending on the learner. And I should also say, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that I talked earlier about it's some combination of competencies and credentials and connections that we can talk about one group over here who can connect into the credentialing marketplace and find a certificate or a badge or a degree or something else pretty easily. And then there's the group that needs more support, but they're in the marketplace. They just don't know what choices to make. They need help. I think we all also know, especially for folks coming out of the OER space, that there is still a very large group, almost a third of American adults who don't have a credential and who don't have previous formal post-secondary education. And so the question is not only what's happening in the marketplace and for the folks who are there, but what about all of these people over here who are needing better and more learning and working opportunities who haven't even connected to the marketplace in the first time? And how do we connect with them and get them in there? Jeremiah, a question for you in your, I think, pretty relevant to your work at the Community College. What's your take on extended transcript, e-resumes, portfolios, badges, blockchain? Those are all sort of hot right now. Is one more promising than another, do you think? Yeah, I think it's too early to tell that one is doing a lot better than another. We developed an extended transcript relative to our direct assessment programs and in doing so, we learned a lot of things and then more recently, I was at the IMS Global LIA Conference in Denver and I saw UMEC's presentation that they did on their extended transcript and I was pretty impressed by some of the things that they had done and I think the pathway that they're heading, at least in that regard is very valid to go beyond the competencies and list the connections of the artifacts to those competencies so that there's this more referential integrity for people to understand how people got there. It was some pretty impressive work. We've had our sites set on wanting to be able to push completions and badges and things out of our work to some other portfolio system, LinkedIn or whatever but we just haven't felt that the marketplace is exactly in the right mix yet and we haven't found the right alignment for this types of things and I think it's a great direction to head because it helps level that the playing field of, hey, I have this degree section but I don't know if you pay attention to a lot of them but it's like, here's the section where you list degrees and then here's the section where we list the other, right? And it's like, as long as we keep that sort of mentality or organizational structure about the thing then I'm not sure that they're ever gonna they're ever gonna be fully seen as equivalence in different ways.  It really allows people to do creativity but it kind of maybe lacks some other things that I see in other areas that are better.  Some interesting things are coming out and really I think the ultimate future lies in things like, I'm very familiar with the company Tencent who does the massive app, Mobile App WeChat in China and they're actually having companies that are coming to them because they have such amazing big data because WeChat is kind of like a combination of Facebook and LinkedIn with PayPal and so you can get this sort of richness of data around people's lives and so you can see all their interests and where they're going and I think eventually we get to this sort of semantic web big data point employers will be able to make algorithms to identify people who are the right fit for jobs based on their actions and all of the things that they're indicating so that they could actually pursue people who are the right fit for that, whether they're looking for that job or not. Katie, I might add, so I mentioned my move twice not time to mention my mama's status. Poor Katie has been subjected to several thousand photos of my two boys over the years. I think as a mom, so just the human element here, the idea of portfolios and having some sort of digital record that shows what my boys, as they progress through their lives, know and can do and the kinds of experiences that they've had is pretty powerful and it's matched with the professional knowledge of how unpredictable the future of work seems to be and I just am losing my, I am a cautious mother and I'm not certain, I don't feel sort of anchored and trust that if they carry along credentials from particular institutions that those will be enough to show what they know and can do and so when I think about it from that perspective, the e-transcripts as they continue to evolve or allowing my boys to own their learning and be able to have it held by them rather than a particular institution is extremely powerful. I think that's key and you've both mentioned it, right? The learner, worker, student having control over their own knowledge and learning. Now the equity piece of me would say that that will only work if it has substantial buy-in and saturation so you can do that but if it's only happening in these more alternative spaces or more distance learning or university college with adult learners and it is not paired with substantial employer buy-in or the buy-in of higher education leaders and others, then it won't have the kind of hold and power when they bring in that kind of piece. I'm hoping my boys are six and four that it will evolve quite substantially by the time they need to use something like this. Yeah, imagine what the technology will look like when their job hunting. I do not want to. Okay, so we're gonna do one or two more questions and then I'd love to have some questions from the audience for the panel. So speaking of saturation and buy-in which is the end game, right? Employers are the primary consumers of credentials so they have to hire based on credentials, they have to know what someone who comes in the door knows and can do for them. Do you find that employers are valuing e-transcripts? Are they on board with some of the newer types of credentials are students able to communicate them and get hired based on some of the smaller blocks? So I think Katie should answer this based on the employer engagement work group for connecting credentials and some of the things that she's heard from employer cosponsors, if you would. Yeah, happy to. And I'd love to hear about any of your employers if they're buying into the e-transcript. So the headline I think is that the progress is slow, right? We have some leading large employers plugged into connecting credentials who have started to turn the tide. We have Ernst and Young, a representative from Ernst and Young in our stakeholder group for connecting credentials. And you may have seen a year or two ago now in the UK, Ernst and Young stopped using a bachelor's degree as a proxy for hiring. And they're now using lists of competencies in the application process, which is a big deal. There are other big employers in the US who are starting to trend that direction as well.  So one other example that I'd mention as I guess a lighthouse is Lake Michigan College in Michigan, it works very closely with their employer partners mostly manufacturing and a one big hospital system. And employers have asked for a list of 10 things that someone can do in addition to their credential. So the credential matters less when you have the list of competencies and can hire an interview based on that. But we hear all the time still that employers just need to get someone in the door who can show up on time, they can teach them on the job. The credential matters less than sort of the employability skills, the non-technical skills. So I would say that there are leaders emerging but that it's slow. And we're trying to highlight these examples as much as possible. And to show the ROI, you take less time hiring, there's less turnover, you get a clearer picture of what someone can do than you might get just because they have a history degree, no offense to anyone who has a history degree and political science. And the other thing just to extend wearing the connecting credentials hat that we heard in that space was as many of you may know that many large employers are using big data to be able to cull through resumes and figure out what candidates are eligible for particular jobs and that there's a legitimate technology limitation in the supply and demand signaling and a real clear need for funders and investors who might be in this room to up the investments in developing better and more streamlined, unlining technologies that figure out how to unpack what questions do you ask of folks who are uploading their resume to monster.com or to some other, you know, or giving it to a firm, how do you begin to unpack those documents and put them into a more competency-based hiring frame? Yep. Yeah, our experience has been pretty well received. We go to HR departments of our regional employers that we were working with and by and large when we show them credential frameworks and we talk to them about that, the HR departments love it. But the problem that they have is that a lot of them are smaller businesses and they don't have the money to invest in being able to understand exactly what the competencies are for the particular job roles. Now, I mean, there are a number of professional organizations that are working. You know, I think Akeem is a great example of that in health information management. And I think as things sort of head towards that sort of a model, we'll look at some change, but I don't know that the average HR offices is ready to start thinking about things in terms of competencies. But you know, we have this conversation all the time about people come in with a bachelor's degree from here or there and they don't understand, an HR office isn't equipped to understand the subtle nuances of this course at this institution from this course at that institution and what do those courses even mean anyway? So there's no real way for them to get from that to job skills. So they all see it as like, oh wow, it's an aha moment, but they're just not quite, most of them just aren't quite ready for it yet. And I know that I keep sort of bludgeoning the point here, but the role of social capital and pedigree cannot be ignored in this. You know, I've sat on the hiring end, I've looked at, oh, he was a Marine Corps member. Oh, she's a Teach for America alum. Oh, God, look where he went to school, he went to WashU. We do that. We might not name it and own it, but we always do it. We sift and we sort and we connect to the networks that we're connected with. And so as we think again about how are we not only getting folks to navigate this space where they might become credentialed in smaller and more piecemeal ways or newer ways, I really, really believe that we have to be much more deliberate and intentional in exploring the role of social capital and exploring how we equip folks not only with the competencies to obtain a particular degree, but then use that degree for the advancement purposes that it was intended. And that we plan for that in an intentional way. So there's a ton going on. We've touched on a little bit of it and I know lots of you are involved in other innovations that are underway. One that I think is interesting to mention about social capital specifically, which is sometimes unintentionally, sometimes intentionally left out of the conversation, right? Credly, who's one of our partners or some of you may be familiar with is newly working with City and Guilds. And part of what they'll be building into their digital platform is an algorithm that accounts for brand power, which I think is so important because sometimes it's not mentioned, but it can't be underestimated. We're human, we recognize what we recognize. And history is history. And so brands are brands for a reason. So I think all sorts of interesting examples of work going on. And we've been a little bit critical, but hopefully thought provoking. Who has questions for the panel? I think we've got a few minutes left, yep. Something that really interests me is boot camps, how they've come up so quickly, how employers are hiring a lot of graduates from boot camps. What do you guys see the traditional higher ed market? How are they trying to compete with that? And what are you guys learning good and bad from those? So I mean, I think that there are some extremely successful and effective boot camps. General Assembly is the one that comes to mind. I would just flag again my pedigree and who gets in and who does well and who has the prerequisite skills and competencies to financially and practically support a program like that. But the idea of intense training in short periods of time that often is experiential, one of the things that I think is a great opportunity of boot camps or these smaller forms of credentials in which what you get at the end of a boot camp I would consider a newer form of credential is things that are better aligned to how we learn and live. Like fundamentally, on the one hand, folks are looking for efficiency. Is it faster, cheaper? But on the other hand, the more optimistic human end is it more like how we learn and live. And so for boot camps, what an incredible opportunity for folks to very quickly and for some, not all, affordably upskill and advance. And if somebody has brand power, what Katie said, then it really can have a huge lift. So General Assembly to me is a premier example of someone who has brand power and buy in within their industry and other industries where it functionally acts like what I just mentioned, a Marine Corps or Teach for America or a Peace Corps. There's some level of halo effect there where there's an association of what it means that you went through this particular program and what that might say about who you are. I don't feel like it's an either or. I mean, I think there's plenty of room for both. You know, it's not about, it shouldn't really be about competition. It's about fulfilling the needs and having the right alignment, right? I mean, so maybe the boot camp is what that particular group needs to get to that level, but maybe a traditional course is what this other group needs to get to that particular level. I think there's room in the marketplace for all of those things because people have such wild varying needs as far as delivery modes and skill sets are concerned. We, of course, support the competition. We're not a higher ed institution. And there is some competition. Some schools in Michigan are losing enrollees to boot camps, which they can get done in two weeks, six weeks, eight weeks for much cheaper. So that is certainly an issue. And that's just the way it's working in the market right now. There are some neat examples at a couple of colleges in Michigan in healthcare where the waitlist to get into an RN program in Brown Rapids is two years. And so they've started sending applicants to a boot camp first that gets them through the first, however many credits of the RN program, then they're able to sort of stagger entry and let some in a semester late, a year late depending on the boot camp they attend in. And so that's a really positive model. It works out for the learner. It works out for the institution. They can keep the waitlist down and it just increases efficiency. So I think, yes, there's, certainly there's some competition in the market, but there are great examples of them working together also. And I wanna add something on top of that. Relative to the work that they're doing, I think over time you'll start seeing better alignment between things where, as different career pathways emerge and there are competency frameworks within those, that you'll see these things like boot camps that all sort of stack and lattice into these other things. So as two year or four year institutions become more adaptive to understanding what those things are and how to roll those things into. I know in our particular instance, I mean, we accept some of the credentials from AHIMA that roll into your CSC and coding or your associates in health information management. And so, you know, you can start it with a boot camp and then it builds and it builds and it's all about seeing those pathways and the alignments across all of the different choices. Another question? Mm-hmm. Sure. And then we'll get one more. Yeah, so you talking about what I'm, you didn't, I don't know if you used the phrase, but it's almost sounds like a step, they hear the phrase stackable credential where there's actually a college credit evaluation that's tied to this smaller unit. And is that something that might be a way to sort of minimize the class problem we were thinking about of two classes of learning, two classes of training, where if I've got my, you know, five classes in web development, but it's worth 15 credits, I could stop there, but then maybe I can go on to Lord Fairfax or wherever. Do we see that as a potential way to minimize the two tier system? And also, is that something that is, seems to me that's something that should proliferate? Is that something you're seeing? Absolutely. We advocate for stackable credentials and try to figure out the best way to make it clear what the opportunities are, right? How you can stack different credentials, how you can show what your competencies are. You know, we are looking in depth at all sorts of different groups where this is very pronounced, like immigrants and refugees. And you know, I flew, I was an army medic, but I came back and had to start at square one. To be an EMT. And so, yes, absolutely, stackable credentials are a great opportunity, I'd say, in short. And I'm sure both of you have the same. Yeah, I think that there's the sort of logical sequencing of stacking up credentials and then there's those sort of mobility markers that I was mentioning before. So in the one hand, being able to do an array of things that I can afford in access to build toward a career path or sort of sequential career advancement is terrific when it works. Another thing that's interesting is coaching and supporting a learner, regardless of age or stage, in a very sort of quick, higher income, you know, get this quick certificate or credential that can get you into a higher paying job, that can get you family sustaining wages, that gives you the economic stability that later enables you to pursue your career pathway. And that's a different kind of stacking that we don't always talk about.  We just moved my mom into town and she's aging, she's on social security, she can't actually live on the social security payments that she's making, but she's been a substitute teacher mostly for special education for 15 years and way back when got a graduate degree in counseling, but she can't get hired as a teacher because she doesn't have the degree, so she makes less than $80 a day to function as a teacher, which is not a living wage, which is hard for her and it's also hard for her, don't kids who are helping care for her. There are shorter pathways for career and economic boosting and stability that also need to be looked at and those connect in with things that we have been thinking about for years, things like prior learning and being able to assess in some of the colleges and places represented here, but I think we still have a ways to go on that end. Right, yep, yeah, I mean, I think bottom line is using credentials as an opportunity to tell our story in what we know and can do in a way that makes sense to the world and helps get us better opportunities is what the goal should be. Yeah, and there was a question here. It's you. Yeah, I saw your hand a minute ago.  And so the question is, what do we name things? Like marketing now and education is really harder than it's ever been. Two-year degree, four-year degree, certificate, graduate degree, now it's like what? You know, like what we got here? And so any comments on how we sell these things as universities and how do we appeal both to the employer and to the student and talk about jobs for the future, how do we give them the tools to create their story so they can have a job for the future as opposed to a job for today? I amazingly feel your pain. I mean, this is the exact situation that we've been in in trying to sell the competency-based education, direct assessment programs, it's confusing. I mean, higher education is already kind of confusing and then you add this, oh, we've got this new thing and it looks like this and la la la and it's just overwhelming. So, you know, the work that we've been doing sort of points to that we have to spend more time working with employers to understand what their needs are and then we either work through them or in concert with them to develop the right things for them. And I think that's where the whole thing, that's the crux of the entire kit and caboodle. You know, if you look at the industries that have these credentials, these post-secondary awards that are being super successful, they're spending the time to do research, to go into these employers to understand what the competencies are like at the job level so that education can be mapped to them, right? Instead of, hey, we're gonna educate people over here and we're gonna create jobs over here and then we're gonna try to figure out what the alignment is. You know, it really just doesn't make sense. And I would love to tell you that there was some simple answer or some great idea that I came across if there was, we'd already be using it. But I think the reality is, is that we're gonna have to try to get away from some of this derogatory language in general around micro-nano because if you don't know much about higher education, when you look at it, you're already thinking, well, this is just some little tiny thing, right? What does that mean? And I think we need to be more cognizant of the branding language that we use around these things and try to make it simpler and maybe not even focus on what the delivery modes are and just focus on, hey, this is the job that you're gonna get at the end of the, this is what the point of this thing is. This is for this job and that's what's gonna get you there. So I would add just two very quick things. In one of the early conversations of C-Bend, the competency-based education network, Chris, you may have been a part of this conversation. We had a conversation about, you know, as parents or people, like, do you wanna be merely competent, right? Like, I want my child to be competent.  So I think it's the difference between whether we setting our systems up, designing systems and supporting people. So from a human-centered perspective, it is how do I recognize and what a person knows and can do and develop that person to his best potential or to pursue the opportunities he wants from a system's perspective? It's how do we enable learners and workers to move on when ready? How do we articulate the skills and attitudes and dispositions that they need to be prepared? Bottom line, are they fully prepared to take on a particular role or job at a system's perspective? But fundamentally, from a human-centered perspective, it's how do we let these people thrive? And can we design our learning and working pathways to support that possibility? So just to put a bow on it, I think to answer the question that's in the title of our panel, right, Alternative Credentials vs. Degrees, Andre Compliment or Replacement, we'd probably say all three in some cases. Thank you for your great questions. I'd like to thank our panelists. I appreciate it. Looking forward to the rest of the day. Thank you.


A former physical plant manager at Bemidji State University has been sentenced to 90 days in jail for purchasing personal items with a BSU payment card. The Bemidji Pioneer reports Jeff Sandy was sentenced to 90 days in jail today after pleading guilty to using the card to purchase more than $36,000 worth of items, including a lawn tractor, a snowblower, and a king-sized waterbed. According to the Pioneer, the 90-day jail sentence will be split with Sandy serving 45 days in Beltrami County jail and 45 days on home monitoring. He's eligible for supervised release after serving two-thirds of the jail time, which is 30 days. Sandy is scheduled to report to jail on Tuesday, April 9th. Pioneer says a hearing is set for May 17th to determine how much Sandy should pay the university.


All right, I think we are live now Hey everybody, welcome to episode six. I think of Chat loop back off pretty excited to have everybody here with me today My name is Jeremy. If you haven't seen me before I'll be guest hosting today We're getting super close to kubecon. So G fees actually on his way to kubecon If you don't know me my again, my name is Jeremy I'm a chair for sick release in kubernetes and I'm a software engineer at microsoft I've done a bunch of things in the cloud native space. So you may have seen me in a few other places Um, I'm in colorado and it's a super cold wintery day I actually didn't have power until about 20 minutes ago So super exciting that I could be on the stream with everybody today We're getting a really crazy late winter snowstorm, but I guess that's pretty normal for Springtime in the Rockies. We're going to get something like 30 centimeters or 12 inches of snow when this is all said and done Which is pretty exciting. I think uh Can't can have a stream without some sort of exciting event kind of kicking in But I've got some tea, uh, and the sweater's pretty warm. So let's kick the stream off This live stream is a sibling to a similarly named Show called a clash loop back off which is an event that's held at kubecons And is more of a competition style thing you can kind of think of iron chef In that one two competitors get pitted together to solve some sort of challenge where they don't really have any info On what the challenges are going to be so it's it's really about kind of learning and seeing how those experiences go It's meant to be laid back Mostly and and generally pretty fun This stream is more of a I guess a self-inflicted kind of challenge where we're going to take a topic Where we haven't done any real in-depth Research and we're gonna instead focus on how we learn and take a take a new approach to that topic and kind of See where our journey takes us I'm gonna I'm going to go through and read some documentation and kind of learn about the project Like I normally would even if I wasn't on a stream today In doing so, I hope we can all walk away with Some new information about the project and just a greater awareness of the cloud native ecosystem Today we're going to be learning about telepresence, which is a cncf sandbox project that aims to provide Fast local development for kubernetes and open shift microservices. That sounds pretty cool I think anything that can help us kind of shift that development loop to the left sounds pretty cool to me As a person that builds services and ships them to kubernetes So i'm excited to have you here to dive into the project with me today figure out how it works and again Hopefully we can all learn a little bit more about the cloud native ecosystem and come away with some new New knowledge during the live stream feel free to drop questions into the chat And i'll try to get to as many of those as I can If you see that i'm struggling or you have a suggestion you've worked with this this project before Please feel free to interject and drop some suggestions into the chat and help us help us all learn and go along I think that's where we're all gonna get the most benefit out of this And when we learn as a community and as a group, I think that's the the best outcome for us That said this is a an official live stream of the cncf and is subject to the cncf code of conduct So please don't add anything to the chat that Or the questions that would violate the the code of conduct basically just please respect everybody In the chat all the fellow The participants and me this video will be available on youtube afterwards So folks that couldn't make it today will be able to still follow along and join us just asynchronously Before we dive into telepresence. So let's uh take a spin around the cloud native landscape and see What kind of news is out there? Maybe just see some exciting new developments that are happening And obviously the the most important one is cube con is upon us I'm gonna share my screen really quick and we can look at a couple of links while we're going through this See if I can do that I'm trying to use two screens. We'll see how this goes Okay, I think this will work Maybe give me one second here. Ah, there it is There's the bar. Okay, so I'm gonna click this button Hopefully we'll see a live screen just a second adding the source sharing my screen All right, hopefully that's showing up now. Um, everybody in the chat want to Oh, hey, new no nice to see you in the uh in the chat with us today Super bum that I won't be at cube con Really really bum to miss on miss out on this. I think there's a lot of really cool content in the schedule If we click on explore the schedule, we can see a bunch of really cool things There's a lot of content even on the pre-days that I think people can take advantage of seems like a really extensive set of lighting talks a bunch of which I think are really really exciting And again, like I'm really bummed that I'm gonna miss this miss this But one thing I wanted to call people's attention to let's see if we can find it in here Is Clash loop back off. I mentioned that kind of in the intro. It's our it's the kind of the competitive version of this Um, I did it at cube con in chicago and it was super fun.  So we don't really get any time to prepare and it's um, it's stressful and fun All at the same time. I think uh, the audience had a really good time In chicago, so I totally recommend people check this one out I think I got a little sneak preview of who's going to be involved and it should be pretty fun The challenges look like they're going to be pretty good too. So if you're going to be at cube con, definitely check out pavilion number seven in the project pavilion space at 1830 on On wednesday, I think it'll be a super good time All right, and then next as I was kind of looking for some new new updates I saw there were a number of things in the ecosystem about About wasm lately. There was a project announced yesterday. I think called spin cube From the people at fermion And I also noticed on the cncf blog that there was a an intro post just a couple days ago About web assembly on kubernetes. So it seems like a pretty hot topic and I thought this was just an interesting one I don't know a ton about web assembly in this space So I thought this was a pretty interesting blog kind of walks through Some overviews of like what it is and then dives into some of the tooling and if you're going to be at cube con I think there's a keynote that's happening on thursday. Let's see if we can find that A couple lightning talks. It looks like a tutorial Pretty cool. Yeah, so a panel discussion um revolutionizing cloud native architectures with web assembly that You know, I think will be a another really cool way to learn a little bit more about web assembly It would recommend folks checked out out if you're interested in web assembly That'll be at thursday at nine fifteen. It looks like it has folks from fermion from zeis and from microsoft Moderated by by taylor should be a pretty good time Another one that I thought was pretty cool was that open telemetry has applied for graduation to move from incubation to graduation That'll be a really cool evolution to see that happening It's been a long time in the works and last year. There was a lot of work put into Stabilizing things and getting things ready to go. I'm sure we'll all be Happy to see some stability with with open telemetry going forward. So that's that's really an exciting development to see And then lastly really close to my own heart The kubernetes release team has just released the kubernetes 130 beta So if you're tracking along, uh, you might be aware of this, but this is the the point at which You know, the release is starting to firm up. We've hit code freeze already So the beta release is going to be your first opportunity to really see some of the functionality that's going to land in the release Definitely subject to change Definitely are probably some rough edges and some issues But if you have the ability, I would totally recommend checking out that release You know, if you run into any issues or bugs, definitely feel free to open issues help make this a more stable Easy to consume better release for everybody else We're just about a month away from the release. So here's the kind of the calendar if we want to scroll through that a little bit kubekan eu So we're we're just about right here So tuesday is when the beta release happens, you know pretty fresh off that Headed into kubekan not a whole lot's going to happen I think like most places kind of slows down The release team definitely takes a break for that But once they come back, it's going to be right back into things and you know We'll have release blogs ready to go feature blogs ready to go there'll be a test freeze and then your last chance to to have input with the rcs and then On april 17th, we're going to have kubernetes 130.0. That's pretty exciting I was the release lead for 120. So it's amazing to see that we've gotten 10 releases past that So it seems like it's not been that long, but We're definitely definitely getting there All right, so now we're going to dive into telepresence. We've gotten the that news out of the way. Let's let's Let's turn to the matters of at hand. So I'm going to close these other windows And we're just going to open up the telepresence project itself Again, I haven't done any real Research into this. I'm familiar with what it's what it does But beyond that haven't really Haven't really invested any time in learning about it. So we're going to do that together right now Let me bring up the chat just so I have everything in case anybody wants to ask anything while we're going And we should be able to do that down here. Boom. There we go. Okay Okay, so what is telepresence? Um, so telepresence is a sandbox project in the cncf Looks like it was started by the team at ambassador labs They're responsible for some cool networking stuff Um, it Proports to be a fast local development for kubernetes and open shift So they they want to accelerate the dev loop shift testing left, which is super great And then use your existing workflow So not making you learn a new code editor or a new debugger profile or just using what you have today Anything that runs on your laptop will work with telepresence. That seems seems pretty cool Um, I'm not sure how it works though. So let's let's check that out So telepresence consists of two architecture components the client side telepresence binary So I guess we're gonna have to install that onto my mac And then the client the cluster side traffic manager and traffic add-on. So those will be in our our kubernetes cluster I'm gonna try to do this with kind today. Um, I can go spin up a cluster in a cloud provider But I want to I want to really focus on trying to keep this um in my local development environment Which this would normally be my my mac. So we'll try that out first Okay, so looks like the telepresence connect command Utilizes that component in the cluster to do some proxying between our development machine and the cluster Um, we're gonna try it out locally first to see how that works Um, I think we can extrapolate that that might look the same for a remote cluster And then running telepresence intercept service name triggers the traffic manager to install a traffic agent proxy That runs within the pot. So maybe a sidecar that goes along with that. Let's uh, we'll try that out Okay, so looks like they've got a getting started button. We're going to just start with that That's how I would normally go about trying this out Get it installed and then we'll kind of work through reading some more of the docs to to understand what we're doing Okay, so prerequisites we need, um cube ctl and I definitely have one of those installed Let's check and make sure cube ctl. Yep, cool. And this is 129.2. So using a pretty new release. I also already have a kind cluster Hopefully that'll satisfy this a kubernetes deployment and a service We're I think I have one of those handy too. So we can we can totally check that out. Um, I've got these sample projects that I've used a bunch of different times um from digital ocean and Inside of here, I think maybe game 2048 seems like a good one I think uh, gfu use one of those in the the Gateway api episodes. We'll use that just for some continuity Okay, so, um, what do we do first looks like to do this, uh, we're going to use curl to install it um I definitely have a silicone mac. So we're going to try this one down here. Almost did the wrong thing So let's grab that nothing like pseudo curling things from uh, from the internet So let's let's give that a whirl first. Okay, so we're gonna do that We're gonna run, uh, let me know if the text is big enough on this, uh, folks in the chat if you're Having trouble seeing internet Gonna run this we're going to uh, it looks like curl down that binary from Get ambassador.io and then install it to user local bin telepresence. That makes sense Doing that now Okay, so now Moment of truth. Do we have telepresence permission denied Is that any instructions? sure enough Jumping ahead of myself Pretty uh zoom in just maybe for the replay. Okay. I can do that. Thanks. You know, let's let's give that a whirl Okay, so we will Pseudo chmod this user local bin telepresence Okay, so now once more, what did they say a plus that okay, let's give that a try user local bin Telepresence Okay, so once more Ah, these are our telepresence. I probably have I don't know why it's not picking it up. Um Nuno said but it's a website at the same time So it should be fine. You only see the webpage right now But not the console. Oh, you don't see the the webpage. Is that not showing up? In here, let's see. Maybe I need to change what I'm sharing. I'll also zoom that text. Uh, so can you Yeah, I see in the stream and it's not showing that so let me um, let me stop sharing and I'll share again let's see I have never done this before Okay It's still only picking up the website Technical difficulties. All right, we can fix this I was sharing the wrong thing I was sharing a screen or a window not a screen. Okay. Um, now Is that showing up correctly? Can we see the The terminal? I think so. I see it in the stream window now. Boom. Okay, cool So let's take a look at um at telepresence. So we've got the command here and It's got a bunch of different commands underneath of it. Um a config a connect gather logs gather traces Generate yaml. Um a helm sub command probably used for installing some things Help intercept. I think that one was mentioned before Um a bunch of different different commands. I think that we'll we'll try to walk through here So let's bounce back to the docs for a second and keep going through our our quick start guide here Okay, so we did that. Um now we need to install telepresence into our cluster So we're going to run the telepresence helm install command Let's give that a shot And I think it says you're gonna need root access on the machine. So probably need to do this with sudo sudo helm install. Okay, cool traffic manager successfully installed. Let's take a look at what's in our cluster now I'm gonna do a kubectl get pods and let's look across all the namespace because I have no idea where this was installed My terminal is not responding now Let's try that again kubectl get pods dash a Okay, so in this one Um, you can see the the normal things that come with kind the things that are leaving in kubesystem But we definitely have this new namespace ambassador and uh a pod inside of it called traffic manager Um, I'm kind of curious what else is in there. So let's uh, let's do kubectl get all in the namespace ambassador Okay, so we've got a pod obviously we saw that a second ago Looks like there's one replica of it running. There is a service Which is a type cluster ip agent injector and there's a traffic manager We also have a deployment and replica set that goes along with that Let's see if I can Kind of curious what it what it looks like. So we're going to describe it Okay, opens up some ports. It looks like Looks like it's running correctly I'm gonna get the yaml. I'm just kind of curious about what it has I'm sorry. Let's get it in yaml So we have normal deployment with a bunch of metadata goes along with it. That's fine Okay, so the containers we have telepresence, uh image right here coming from docker hub data wire I think that was the ambassador name from a long time ago Looks like it exposes a couple ports one for g rpc one for the api Has some normal Normal stuff. Oh, so it's pretty straightforward. It's not a whole lot going on inside of this right now Okay, so let's jump back to our our getting started guide and see what's next Okay, so we want to intercept a service next with telepresence. You can create global intercepts The intercept all traffic going into your service in your remote cluster and then route it to your local environment instead So we're going to connect to your local cluster with telepresence connect and connect to the kubernetes api server All right, so let's do that telepresence connect Okay connected to context kind kind namespace default So if we do this now Exactly what I'd expect because it's not authenticated That's cool All right Yep, 401 is responses Okay, so now you have access to your remote kubernetes api server as if it were on state network Mine was already. Uh, so maybe a kind cluster wasn't the best for this but we're going to keep going with that just for now Um Under telepresence list and make sure the service you want to intercept is listed. Okay, so let's see. I shouldn't have anything here No workloads deployments staple sets or replicas. Okay, so let's um, let's deploy one We need to have that that was one of the prerequisites. So I'm going to bounce over and use that sample application That's going to be uh in kubernetes examples Sample apps Okay, and then game 2048. Okay, so we're going to use this as our project Uh, it's funny. They use tilt for this. I think that's another Tool that's kind of in that space Okay, so for this one, we're going to build this docker file and deploy it And then it looks like they use customize to deploy a couple things. So let's let's do that first. We're going to build it I think the instructions in the read me were pretty good last time I used this which was quite a while ago But we're gonna do that. So we're going to do docker build Um, we'll put it into my docker hub makes makes sense 2048 Latest Okay, so we built the image pretty quickly. Um, let's do a docker push Um, and while that's going maybe I'll create a a kubernetes cluster in azure just to Have um, have a remote one that we can try this out on as well. So I'll do az aks Create I don't remember how to do this. So we're gonna use the Azure CLI real quick to do that. Okay, so we want to do basically az aks create and then the resource group and the name it's going to be so we'll do az group create Dash dash name crash loop back off and location, let's do um south central us That should be pretty close to me Okay, we've got to we've got to log in again. So we'll do that in a second Put the head this open again already. So we built that and Now we want to push that to our street did that. Okay, so we want to deploy this to kubernetes We have to use customize for that and it looks like the customization uses Uh, just a couple of files that are in this resources folder. So let's let's update this deployment and get it going Looks like um, this will be pretty easy to change So let's just do that real quick I think I called it 2048 latest, right? Let's see. Yeah 2048. Okay, cool. So that should be fine I think everything else here is exactly what we want Um, it's gonna create a namespace for us and a service. Okay, so we should be Good to go and I think this will be really easy to deploy Qubectl. Yep Qubectl apply dash k Customize. Okay, let's do that. Okay, so Qubectl apply dash f customize No map been found for the name name and namespace bar In from customize Customization go back up one. I don't think that'll matter, but okay. What's wrong with my Customization here Correct. All right. I don't think we actually need customized for this. So let's just try to deploy it. Um Qubectl create namespace and we'll call it um game 2048 Okay, that's fine apply dash k Oh, is it dash k? You're you're totally right. I read that wrong. Thanks gfee Made you open your laptop Yeah, and for the docs I was looking right at it and typed the wrong thing Geez, okay, so that should work All right, so now Qubectl get pods Game 2048 Okay, um invalid image name. So let's take a look at that Did I not save this? Let's apply it again Nope, I had not saved that Okay, so now that's running So we should have a a nice little thing running So I could do something like Qubectl port forward to this thing And let's try that out real quick 8080 8080 in the namespace Game 2048 Okay, so now that's port forwarded We'll do localhost 8080. Ah cool. There's my game That's fun Okay, so that's running locally and it's on um My kind cluster. So that's that's cool. So now we've got a thing deployed So I think now if we go back to the docs and we do telepresence list That should show us one of the things that's ready to go So let's let's kill that port forward and let's try telepresence list Okay, so first thing I had to do was uh make sure that I use the right namespace. So I think In this documentation, it's assuming you're working out of the default namespace Or you've configured your config to to use the one you want to use so Just keep that in mind if you're you're looking at the docs. Okay, so we have our game 2048 there It's ready to intercept but the traffic agent isn't installed yet. So I think that's the next step that we want to do here Um, so we want to get the name of the port that we want to intercept on our service So we want to do kubectl get service service name output yaml and then look for The port we want to use so we know we know the one we want to use is 8080. So let's um, let's find which one that is So we'll do kubectl get service Game 2048. Okay, so we want to do service game 2048 And we'll we'll grab the yaml That's what doc said to do Okay, so it's named HTTP that makes makes pretty easy Okay, so the docs say that we want to do telepresence intercept the name of the service and then port Whatever the local port is and then the remote port So we actually didn't need the uh, the name of I think we just needed 8080 So we could probably just dump jump for that real fast Um for port we want to specify the local instance that the service is running on If it's using multiples you can specify the one you want intercept after a colon And then for the end file Specify a file path for telepresence to write the environment variables that are set in pod The example below shows telepresence intercepting traffic going to service example service requests now reach the service on port HTTP And the cluster get routed to 8080 on the workstation Okay. Oh, okay. So actually You do need the name of the port um it might work with uh With with numeric things too, but we'll try it this way. I think that'll be the easiest. Okay. So let's do telepresence Intercept I don't have completion turned on so you're gonna have to do with my bad typing game 2048 And then again we want to use port let's say 81 81 because that's different And then HTTP and then dash dash n file We'll say um I bet we've got to specify The namespace yet again. I probably should just switch the namespace so that I have to I don't keep forgetting but Let's do that Use telepresence connect to set the namespace. Okay, cool. So let's try that telepresence Connect let's check that out telepresence connect and namespace string. Okay. So let's do that telepresence connect namespace game 2048 Please quit telepresence and reconnect Is there a telepresence disconnect? Doesn't look like it connect to a cluster Ah Remove existing intercepts leave. I don't think we want to do that one yet Telepresence quit till the day I'm into quit. Okay, let's do that Okay, cool. So now we should be good to do this again with connect and we'll do namespace game 2048 Okay, so now we've connected again with the namespace game 2048 and I think now if we do telepresence list oops list There we go. So game 2048 ready to intercept so Mental note if you're using this you definitely want to connect to the right namespace. Um, if you're not using the default namespace I love learning things live and stumbling across them. It's super fun Okay, so now let's try that Intercept again and we should be able to remove this This namespace thing back here. So again, what we're going to try to do I think is Run telepresence intercept with the name of the service which was game 2048 And then the port we want to use is 81 81 locally and then htp in the remote thing So let's give that a go Okay, cool. So that looks like it was successful. Um, so we're using the deployment game 2048 The intercept name is game 2048. It looks like it's active and the destination is localhost 81 81. So now if we go to New terminal window here localhost 81 81 Oh, okay. So maybe we didn't do that yet. Let's let's keep going in the docs Okay, so start your local development environment using environment variables retrieve from the previous step Okay, so let's take a look at what that looks like We've got n intercept dot env. Okay, so let's take a look what that is Oh, there's a whole bunch of stuff here.  Okay, so The following are some examples of how to pass the environment variables to your local processes Docker run and provide the path using the The argument file Visual studio code that's the one we're going to try in I think So we want to specify the path to the environment file in the m field of your config I've actually never done that before. So let's Maybe start with docker and see right.  So if we look at the env in here It looks like all that stuff was was intercepted and it's good to go Go back to our telepresence quick start All traffic previously routed to your kubernetes service is now routed to your local environment Oh, okay. So is this routing Things from if I hit the service is it routing it to the deployment that I would have a locally? Is that the The way this would work Not the other way around so Let's let's see what happens if I try to port forward to that service and see what happens the services Game 2048 wrong command wrong spelling Okay, so let's port forward to that again It's the inverse of port forwarding which I didn't really think about till just now. I think it's exactly the right That's the right approach. So I think what I really need to do is get this thing running Um locally so that I can connect to it Um as the the local thing. So that's that's an interesting interesting approach And then so let's try that out so 80 80 80 80 Okay, so we're port forwarding and I'm curious like if I run to this now Okay, so it's still like the service intercepts. It looks like it's still hitting That thing, right? I don't think there's I want to see what's in here in the locks so unzip till presence logs Okay, so traffic manager I'm kind of curious what that deployment looks like now come back to trying to get it to work in a second But let's um qctl get pods Game 2048 Oh, okay. So there's there's two pods in it. So it does look like it injected a sidecar. So if you do qctl get deployments 2048 Let's get the yaml for that. Sorry Yep, looks like it was restarted by till presence And in the containers now, I still only have my an original pod ctl get pods Give ctl describe pod Okay, yeah, so it added another container Which is the data wire container And if we get that thing as a yaml we can look at it. Okay, so we've got Our normal game 2048 container And then we have our telepresence container Which is using the image from docker hub. Okay, cool. So that's what it does it installs a sidecar I think that's what's collecting the traffic. Um, I wonder what the service looks like now. Let's take a look at that okay, it is still pointing at port 80 and the http port So this is like a reverse a port forward from inside of the Inside of the container. Is that does that seem right? Is that a so you can connect from your app back to local? Trying to try to wrap my head around what this is is doing right now Let's look at the pod again. So there's port 8080 from my app port 9090 for till presence What was in the end file again? Let's yep, there's Normal things that I would expect Okay, let's check out the docs again. Let's see Give us any more info start your local environment using environment variables retrieved from the previous step What's next? Yeah, so we can see those things. I just this doesn't really give me much Pointer on uh and what I want to do there Okay, well, let's take a look at the architecture while we're We're here With telepresence you can make changes on the fly and see them reflected when interacting with your Kubernetes environments Just like hot reloading, but it works across local and remote environments Query services and microservice are apis that are only accessible in your remote clusters network Set breakpoints in your id and reroute remote traffic to your local machine to that that seems really cool um anybody in the chat if you've used this uh and you have suggestions on like how I can Using these docs get that going. We'd love to see it. Let's let's check out the other docs and see if there's a another way So you've got installing things there Core concept. Okay, how do I Intercept a service from your own environment? Okay, so Before you begin you'd have telepresence installed got that. Okay, so intercepting your service Yep, okay, so this is basically the doc we just have Uh proxy outbound traffic to my cluster. Okay. Let's give this a shot curl Web app emoji voto that's another oops Emoji voto is another uh sample that's in here. That's funny. Okay, so we want to um we With telepresence that think we're able to Access it like that that way. So let's let's try that. So we are connected already telepresence status Okay, that's that's cool. Um We're connected Got one intercept Tell the presence list Yep, there's our intercept name. So now I wonder if the Oh, it's your service dot namespace. Okay, so that should be fine. Right. We can do curl um game 2048 game 2048 oops 2048 Sorry dot if we want port 8080, right? No Oh, that's wrong Okay, cool. I'm through reply from server. That's that's better. Um So now if I put this in the browser, does that work? Let's give that a try We're gonna try telepresence quit and see if it changes it. Yeah. Okay. So it was resolving things Just not going through my browser correctly So we do telepresence connect again. We should be able to bring that back up Oh, I want the namespace, right Okay, and if we try that again Hey, that's cool. It's returning something now. So if I do Ah, it's working So now I can play That and I'm accessing it just like it is a local pot So there's the name of the service and there's the name of the namespace And there's the port it's on that's pretty cool. Um, so you can connect that way and and do stuff. That's Pretty handy it work with large clusters Here we go network considerations for locally hosted clusters that probably would have been useful for me to find a few minutes ago So telepresence connects a virtual network interface that maps the cluster submits to the host machine cool Okay, so there are instructions if you're using something like k3s or mini cube Docker for desktop It may come into play and make things a little bit easier here Um, it still hasn't gotten me to the point where I really know how to um, go to To really debug this. Um, I think that I can spend some more time trying to find the The docs for that and uh, that's probably what I'll do after this But I'm going to jump back to the quick start because at the bottom there was a link to Learning about the architecture and I want to do that while we're here. So we've gotten this working um, and we've kind of seen how What the components look like. So, you know, we did a couple of things like kubectl got pods in Game 2048 and we see that there's two pods now or two containers, I guess inside of that pod One of which is the telepresence piece kubectl get services You know, there's our service. Um, I'm curious if the endpoints are different. It's Yeah, it's endpoints the same. So it's just intercepting things On my machine kind of doing that that way um Yeah, so let's that's that's pretty neat. Uh But it doesn't really give me a good idea of what the Architecture looks like. So let's look at what this looks like Um, this is a pretty pretty decent diagram. I think so This is the cluster and this is that traffic manager component which is living In that ambassador namespace gctl get pods ambassador Okay, so there's our traffic manager and I bet if we um, if we reduce something like get the logs Of that from ambassador Yeah, we can see the things that it's doing. It's injecting Some patches into the pod to make it ready. It's injecting the traffic manager agent into the pod So we've got our stuff there. That's cool but uh What we really have going on is there's that component running which is the one that's in the ambassador namespace Here's our intercepted service and the intercepted container So the service is going through the traffic agent There's the agent injector I was curious if there was another service for For my like a fake service for my thing, but it doesn't look like it. Okay, so The traffic agent is the sidecar that gets intercept gets injected an intercepted thing. Um, so that's cool. We saw that Um Depending on the type of intercept that gets created the traffic agent will either route the incoming request to traffic manager So that he gets to develop his workstation Or it will pass it along to the container and the pod usually having the request. Oh, so there's different maybe different types of intercepts. That's Yeah, so You can build a docker container from the given docker context and run it with the intercepted environment. That's that's pretty pretty cool um, so if you wanted to run my um My 2048 pod locally, I think that's one thing we probably want to do we want to use docker build pass that to it to make it Make it work that way That's that's pretty cool. Um emit the remote environment to an invite m file and compose format. We did that already. Um Runner docker container with the intercepted environment already So that's neat. There's a bunch of different options here that you know Didn't come up when we were just looking at the documentation So definitely pays to to run the commands and kind of mess around with them a little bit more um And kind of understand what you want to do A lot of a lot of different options here That I don't think we have time to play with since we're almost a lot of time here But I think this has given me enough to start kind of understanding how I would use this locally I think the quick start could be a little bit better. Maybe like here's an actual example of a service to use so it was a little bit more Walkthroughy instead of having to figure some of that out, but I think this is pretty Pretty useful. Um, this is what I'm going to check out next time Actually when we're done here, I'm going to keep diving into this a little bit more But I think it'd be really cool to To try that. So actually before we get off real quick, let's see if we can do that We're in the directory where that container is. Let's do tell the presence and I think there was a command to Remove the intercept. Okay, so let's do that till the presence Leave Yeah, the intercept name, right? So it should be Just this Let's connect again and see if that's our issue Okay Okay, so we have our Our friend there, right? So if we do tell the presence leave just takes flags and then the Intercept name, right? So I think it should just be game 248 intercept name game 248 not found Is there another name for it in here? All right. Well, let's that's weird. Let's see if we can make another telepresence In the five minutes we got four minutes we got left. Let's let's try that telepresence intercept Actually, let's see what we did before telepresence so I did 2048 Port okay, so let's make a new one. We'll say a telepresence intercept And we'll call it game 2048 to and I think there was a workload flag That if you use a different one, so we're going to do that so game 2048 and then 82 82 HTTP that's what we're going to do and then I think that command was let's go back a little bit Find it Docker build string Um for the given docker context path or url. Okay, so if we do docker build Like this and dots. Oh, I'm in the wrong directory. That's why We're running low on time and I'm Okay, let's do it. Let's do that again Okay, so now we should be making another intercept which is going to be my game 2048-2 I think that workload flag is what's going to pick the workload And I'm curious what the docker build Port must be of the format port look for container port Service port identifier. Okay, so we want to do 8080 and then HTTP. I think is what we want. Oh, okay. I think that is Running my My thing. Let's let's see what the logs look like for the actual pod Okay, get pod Okay, so there's our pod kubectl logs Yeah, so that's exactly the uh The instructions we expect to see right the output we expect to see HTTP server version The settings that are happening there and then where it's available at So that's what we've got going on here now. And I think if I were to go in here and curl Game 2048 that game 2048 oops, sorry 80 80 right that's the cool So it's returning something and we are seeing the curls happen in the pub. It's running So that's really cool. Um, so we've got that That thing running and uh, it's again, I think like gfee said in the chat It's it's reverse port forwarding. So it's forwarding from inside the cluster back to the daemon that's running on my machine now Which is pretty cool. So that would allow you to run this thing in debug mode if you were able to run In vs code, I would need a set of a dev environment like that But I think that would give me the opportunity To be able to do kind of step through debugging inside. So let's give me my next my next step here Unfortunately, you won't be on the stream because we're we're out of time But uh, hopefully this has given you enough kind of context on telepresence to know, you know, where to begin You can run this on remote clusters. I think that would be the the real interesting use case my kind versions Kind of maybe not the best example of that But if you spin up a cluster in a cloud provider or on bare metal somewhere else You could use this to be able to Connect back to a deployment on your machine Like the actual workload could be on your dev laptop and you can work through that In a much faster way than building the container pushing the container restarting building the container Pushing the container and restarting. So this is this seems really really cool I wish I had maybe done a little bit of research beforehand But that ruins the fun of this right like doing doing the prep work I think takes away some of the fun of kind of stumbling through and and seeing some of this stuff So thanks for joining me today. Um, I hope that you got something useful out of this And we'll see you again next time. Again, thanks. If you're going to kubecon have a safe trip. I have a great kubecon Share share on your social media of all the cool things you see Be really awesome to see What what folks take away from that too. So have a great day and have a great week