 Welcome to the second week of the EGICAL's massive open online course. My name is Shelly Sanchez-Terrell, and I will help you follow and complete this MOOC successfully. In this unit, you will transform a task, homework, or assignment into a learning mission or challenge. As teachers, we must find ways to create meaningful learning experiences for our students and help them feel the importance of their learning. We can make our activities and tasks more meaningful to our students by challenging them to complete a mission instead of just doing homework or completing a simple task. In order to further motivate our students to accomplish their learning missions, we will design digital badges that will be given when missions are completed. The military, clubs, organizations, and sporting events often give their members pins, patches, badges, or other insignias to recognize achievements, good deeds, outstanding work, skill, or leadership. For example, military men and women have badges on their uniforms displaying their rank and honors. When other military members see the insignias on the uniforms, they know how to address and salute the soldier. The members also know what the soldier has accomplished to earn the insignia. Therefore, the insignia inspires other members to celebrate the soldier's accomplishments and inspires other members to strive to achieve the same accomplishments. Digital badges work like this with our learners. We design the badge with a web tool online and let students know what they must do to earn the badge. Students provide us with evidence they have accomplished the missions and we give them the badge digitally. Our learners are motivated to be better digital citizens and create outstanding presentations and projects when given missions and badges. Our students will often display their badges on their blogs or digital portfolios. They will share them on social media and later in life can use their digital badges to show future employers they have important skills such as leadership and working well in a team. Grades do not highlight these kinds of skills that employers often look for. Thank you. For embarking on this learning journey with us, we look forward to reading your reflections about Unit 2 and your portfolios. We want to hear how you motivate learners with missions and digital badges and how that enhances the learning in your classes.