Spotlight on Nateque Mahmood’s OER ‘Building Futures: Construction Career Collection’
When you think about Open Educational Resources (OER) – which we hope you do, and often – your first thought is probably open textbooks. But did you know that OER can take many forms, including videos? This month, we are spotlighting a unique Deakin-published OER: Building Futures: Construction Career Collection,
With funding from Deakin Library’s 2024 OER Grant program, this collection of engaging videos was developed by Dr. Nateque Mahmood, Dr. Abid Hasan, Dr. Glenn Costin and Ankitha Vijaykumar from Deakin’s School of Architecture and Built Environment. The team also worked closely with industry partner Built, whose staff generously shared their time and expertise as interviewees, and Deakin’s Digital Learning and Design Futures (DLF) team, who contributed their production expertise to bring the videos to life.
The collection celebrates the unique qualities of the construction industry in Australia. Viewers can step into the shoes of a graduate project coordinator, site supervisor, health and safety advisor, project coordinator, senior project engineer, senior site manager, social procurement manager, or construction director. Each video is about 5–10 minutes in length, and there are nine in total.
Not only do these videos meet the needs of Australian students by filling an important gap with localised knowledge, the team has generously released them under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC). This allows anyone – anywhere – to access the collection for free and retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute the videos for non-commercial purposes. Indeed, Building Futures: Construction Career Collection has already attracted strong engagement, with more than 150 downloads and over 700 combined views (at the time of writing). Building on this success, the team is now producing a second set of career videos.
Congratulations to Nateque and the team for their commitment to openness, collaboration, and inclusive education and for making Building Futures: Construction Career Collection freely available to all. We invite you to explore the collection and share your feedback with the authors via this feedback form.
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In the spirit of Open Education’s values of openness and transparency, we’d like to share that ChatGPT supported early outlining, drafting, and light editing of this article. The author carefully reviewed, refined, and verified all content, which was also peer-reviewed before publication.