Deakin Open eBooks Catalogue

Communication challenges abound in the 21st century. Communicators everywhere are struggling to connect with diverse, distracted audiences, in both urgent and everyday contexts. In other words, communication has never been more vital, but it’s becoming harder and harder to be heard. In this book, we make sense of communication. From multiple perspectives, we unpack the practices, politics, pleasures, and problems that are activated when meaning is shared across real and virtual spaces. This book will help you use the thinking tools of communication theory to understand why communication matters and how it impacts (and is impacted by) our rapidly changing world.

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Most learning and teaching activities that get created in initial teacher education courses never get seen again once they are assessed as part of an assignment. However, pre-service History teachers undertaking a Master of Teaching at Deakin University have created and shared some of the learning and teaching activities they designed as part of a renewable assignment. This Open Education Resource (OER) contains activities on ancient history, empires, twentieth century world history and early twenty-first century history, with a focus on diverse narratives and perspectives. It showcases their emerging content and pedagogical understanding as well as their capacity to engage with open pedagogy and design copyright compliant materials. Although the activities have been mostly designed around the curriculum requirements of the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE), they are easily adapted to fit other curriculum contexts and content.

This textbook is designed to serve as an additional resource for the course “Fundamentals of Finance.” It provides an introduction to the field of finance, encompassing a broad range of key topics. These include the time value of money, bond and equity valuations, risk and returns, and various sources of capital. This book aims to enhance the learning experience by offering a thorough understanding of these fundamental financial principles.

Assessment should benefit all students’ learning and retention. However, current systems do not take into account the diverse characteristics, backgrounds, and situations of students. Instead, universities rely on accommodations – which are only available to specific groups – to make case-by-case adjustments, rather than proactively improving assessment designs in ways that are socio- culturally, and research informed, for the purposes of inclusion.

This resource is an outcome of a project which explored assessment policy and practice across the university sector. It introduces assessment for inclusion concepts, drawing on curated resources and case study examples, to offer introductory considerations for anyone in higher education interested in being a leader in assessment for inclusion, at all levels from the classroom through to institutional decision makers.

This focus on the distributed leadership of assessment for inclusion aligns with the idea that more than what individuals can achieve alone, it is also how people can lead, promote, inspire, and support others to do the same. This resource has been created with the intention to raise questions for sharing with colleagues, to facilitate the discussion of problems with inclusion in assessment, and to support the development of context-appropriate strategies around assessment design and implementation.

This resource was designed to support students in the Graduate Certificate of Higher Education Learning and Teaching at Deakin University, specifically in the assessment unit, EEE741 “Designing and Implementing Assessment for Learning in Higher Education”.

A significant challenge for neurodivergent students is the transition to studying in a new environment. This book focuses on assisting students with this transition by guiding them through different learning activities and information to support the team-based learning they will engage in during their degree. The resources in this book are designed to be accessible for all students and staff, with the aim of developing an understanding of disability and neurodiversity, teamwork and communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with peers to achieve common goals. The resources shared here can be utilised within individual units to support student skill development in inclusivity, engagement with others and the capacity to contribute towards highly functional teams.

To align the teaching and learning of building measurement with current industry practices and standards in Australia, it is essential to update traditional teaching materials. Existing textbooks predominantly focus on manual measurement methods and provide limited coverage of computer-based techniques that are now widely adopted in professional practice. This handbook addresses this gap by integrating digital measurement tools, particularly RIB CostX software, which reflects contemporary industry workflows. The approach adopted in this book aligns with the principles of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Methods of Measurement (ANZSMM) and supports alignment with industry expectations. This handbook covers key trades, namely groundworks, concrete, formwork, reinforcement, and masonry, which are covered in building measurement and estimating units such as SRE272-Building Measurement, SRE302- Building Measurement and Estimating, and SRQ774-Construction Measurement and Estimating.

This textbook provides readers with up to date knowledge about the assessment, management and support of people experiencing Long COVID. Learning activities draw upon personas co-authored with people with Long COVID.