Video tours of sustainable building projects on campus: a practical approach to teaching sustainability

Sustainable design and construction have become increasingly important in today's world due to the need for environmental protection and resource conservation. This paper promotes sustainable principles and learning objectives that support related skills by describing a pedagogical tool that uses the built environment as a learning model. Specifically, the paper describes a video assignment used in classes at two Universities focused on teaching sustainability, where teams of graduate and undergraduate students select building projects and create video tours that highlight the sustainable strategies implemented. The assignment requires selecting a building with sustainable features such as energy, water, indoor air quality, materials, site, or social sustainability. The videos are posted on YouTube, making them accessible to a broader audience. This assignment allows students to explore and identify sustainability principles by creating video tours that educate the campus community about sustainable design and construction. By highlighting the sustainable strategies used in the built environment, the assignment aims to raise awareness about the presence and importance of sustainable design and construction, as well as encourage the adoption of these principles in future construction projects. In addition to describing this assignment as a pedagogical tool to improve the teaching of sustainability concepts, this paper presents a rubric to assess what is being taught (sustainable building features) and how it is being communicated.