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Researchers and policymakers have given attention to generic skills development in higher institutions. One of the intentions is to broaden graduate employability with generic skills. In South Africa, there is a paucity of research concerning future built environment practitioners’ (FBEP) generic skills development from the students’ perspective. Thus, this paper aims to investigate South Africa’s FBEP generic skills and suggest feasible solutions to improve FBEP generic skills from the students’ perception.

The researchers collated the views of FBEP via a phenomenology type of qualitative research design. It covered selected South African public universities and investigated the discourses that underpin “perceived hindrance” in developing generic skills for FBEP. Selected 30 FBEP were engaged in the virtual interviews across three public universities. Data saturation was achieved. Three themes emerged and were analysed through a thematic analysis.

Findings show that FBEP generic skills development will enhance integrated productivity and higher value for money in construction project delivery. But developing these skills demands a holistic approach. Findings have raised concern with the perceived hindrances facing FBEP in developing generic skills. Findings suggest the need to revisit and revamp the curricula to develop these skills and strengthen policies that will “nip” possible hindrances.

This study was limited to South Africa’s FBEP generic skills from students’ perception. In line with the limited resources, three public universities were covered from the selected provinces in South Africa. Future research with a more diverse sample is needed to ensure a better representative and generalisation of findings.

Findings show that apart from academic knowledge system thinking skills, civic responsibility skills and critical thinking skills are germane for intending construction industry professionals. Others are integrated teamwork skills, good attitude and communication skills, entrepreneurship skills and resources management skills. Findings from this paper may stir up the education sector’s stakeholders to revamp the curricula in enhancing these skills among students from the basic to higher institutions. The outcome will improve productivity in the construction industry.

Although few scholars have discussed generic skills in the built environment, there are limited studies from the students’ context in developing countries, a South Africa case study, a gap this research aims to fill. Also, it proffers ways to mitigate perceived hindrances facing FBEP in developing generic skills.

Studies showed that construction digitalisation could prevent or mitigate accidents rate on sites. Digitalisation applications may prevent or mitigate building project collapse (BPC) but with some encumbrances, especially in developing countries. There is a paucity of research on digital technologies application to prevent or mitigate BPC in Nigeria. Thus, the research aims to explore the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies from preventing or mitigating building collapse and recommend measures to improve technology applications during development.

The study is exploratory because of the unexplored approach. The researchers collected data from knowledgeable participants in digitalisation and building collapse in Nigeria. The research employed a phenomenology approach and analysed collected data via a thematic approach. The study achieved saturation at the 29th interviewee.

Findings show that lax construction digitalisation implementation, absence of regulatory framework, lax policy, unsafe fieldworkers' behaviours, absence of basic infrastructure, government attitude, hesitation to implement and high technology budget, especially in developing countries, are threats to curbing building collapse menace via digitalisation. The study identified technologies relevant to preventing or mitigating building collapse. Also, it proffered measures to prevent or mitigate building collapse via improved digital technology applications during development.

This research contributes to the construction digitalisation literature, especially in developing countries, and investigates the perceived barriers that may hinder digital technologies usage in preventing or mitigating building collapse in Nigeria.

Studies show that building information modelling (BIM) technology can improve construction productivity regarding the design, construction and maintenance of a project life cycle in the 21st century. Revit has been identified as a frequently used tool for delivering BIM in the built environment. Studies about BIM technology via Revit are scarce in training middle-level workforce higher education institutions. Thus, this study aims to investigate the relevance of BIM technology and offer measures to promote digitalisation in Nigeria’s built environment polytechnic undergraduates via Revit.

Given the unexplored nature of training the middle-level workforce in Nigeria, 37 semi-structured virtual interviews were conducted across Nigeria, and saturation was achieved. The participants were knowledgeable about construction-related BIM. The researchers used a thematic analysis for the collected data and honed them with secondary sources.

Improved visualisation of design, effective and efficient work productivity, automatic design and quantification, improved database management and collaboration and data storage in the centrally coordinated model, among others, emerged as BIM’s benefits. BIM technology via Revit is challenging, especially in Nigeria’s polytechnic education curriculum. The 24 perceived issues were grouped into government/regulatory agencies-related, polytechnic management-related and polytechnic undergraduate students-related hindrances in Nigeria’s built environment.

This study is limited to BIM implications for Nigeria’s built environment polytechnic undergraduates.

This study contributes to the literature paucity in attempting to uncover perceived issues hindering the implementation of BIM technology via Revit in training Nigeria’s built environment polytechnic undergraduates via a qualitative approach.

Impactful pedagogies in Higher Education are required to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. This chapter outlines an inclusive, flexible, and work-based learning curriculum design framework to respond to these needs. Two cases from Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) are used to illustrate this framework in a transnational educational context in Sub-Saharan Africa. Case one explores the impact of a Railway Operations Management program in South Africa, where the views of two cohorts of 137 recent graduates were gathered through an online questionnaire. Case two examines the views of Optometry/Orthoptics students who undertook an intensive two-week clinical work experience on the train-based clinic (Phelophepa train) in South Africa; data was gathered through an online questionnaire from 58 participating students since 2014. Both examples highlight transformative personal experiences and impacts of their education beyond just their studies – to a clearer sense of personal and professional pride, to becoming role models for their families and to developing meta-cognitive skills to support lifelong learning. In the Railway Operations Management example, additional benefits were seen to their organization – through improved interpersonal skills, decision-making, and problem-solving and creating knowledge-sharing – whereas in the Optometry/Orthoptics case life-changing impacts to patients were delivered through this work experience.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on medical education and training, with many medical schools and training programs having to adapt to remote or online learning, social distancing measures and other challenges. This paper aimed to examine the disruption for clinical training, as it has reduced the opportunities for students and trainees to gain hands-on experience and interact with patients in person.

The ethnographic qualitative research design was chosen as the research methodology. Using Gibbs' reflective cycle, the researcher explored the psychiatry clerks' (final-year medical students) reflections on the disruption of their clinical training during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The findings demonstrated that the students had a significant psychological impact on their coping capacities as the crisis progressed from shock and depression to resilience. The students being the key stakeholders provided a concrete foundation for the development of a framework for improving practices during uncertain times.

Students' reflections provided valuable insight into the pandemic’s impact on their psychosocial lives with uncertainty and incapacity to cope up with changing stressful dynamics. The results will assist in planning how to best support medical students' well-being during interruptions of their educational process brought about by similar future crises.

The purpose of this study is to understand user perceptions and misconceptions regarding security tools. Security and privacy-preserving tools (for brevity, the authors term them as “security tools” in this paper, unless otherwise specified) are designed to protect the security and privacy of people in the digital environment. However, inappropriate use of these tools can lead to unexpected consequences that are preventable. Hence, it is significant to examine why users do not understand the security tools.

The authors conducted a qualitative study with 40 participants in the USA to investigate the prevalent misconceptions of people regarding security tools, their perceptions of data access and the corresponding impact on their usage behavior and data protection strategies.

While security vulnerabilities are often rooted in people’s internet usage behavior, this study examined user’s mental models of the internet and unpacked how the misconceptions about security tools relate to those mental models.

Based on the findings, this study offers recommendations highlighting the design aspects of security tools that need careful attention from researchers and industry practitioners, to alleviate users’ misconceptions and provide them with accurate conceptual models toward the desired use of security tools.

Innovative initiatives focusing on social and environmental impact often need help to secure traditional financial resources for their launch. Equity crowdfunding platforms (ECF) provide a potential funding source for these initiatives, particularly for technological inventors. This research paper aims to theorize how ECF campaigns attract investors to invest in technological initiatives with social and environmental value proposition impacts.

Using an inductive qualitative approach, the authors have gained insights, from 35 sustainable technological projects sponsored by a Chilean equity-crowdfunding platform, regarding the business model's transformation to achieve sustainable social and environmental impacts.

Findings show that disruptive technologies and sustainable aims are pivotal factors in successfully attracting investors to support sustainable technological initiatives through ECF platforms or campaigns. These factors led investors to actively engage with these projects and contribute to the value-creation process by transforming business models with social and environmental impacts and utilizing sustainable technology to enhance efficiency and optimize available resources.

Due to the nature of this research, researchers must test the proposed conceptual framework using longitudinal quantitative data from multiple ECF platforms, technological solutions and investors worldwide in future research to enhance the comprehension of this phenomenon.

The findings highlight the significant contribution of ECF platforms and technological portfolios toward creating sustainable impacts. It is a good signal for investors interested in investing in technological initiatives and addressing social and environmental challenges.

The contribution of disruptive technological projects from ECF platforms and ECF investors to tackle social and environmental challenges.

This research theorizes how ECF platforms tackle social challenges by encouraging investors to invest and participate with entrepreneurs in the co-creation process of sustainable technological solutions.

The built environment is a complex sector that demands coordination and cooperation of stakeholders. Construction projects from the complex sector require skills, services, and integration of major disciplines in the built environment. Sustainability of the major disciplines' standards regarding the appropriateness of the built environment tertiary education cannot be over-emphasised in Nigeria. Studies concerning Nigeria's built environment programmes accreditation (BEPA) in the 21st-century education system are scarce. Thus, the study investigated the relevance and perceived factors hindering Nigeria's BEPA in the 21st-century education system. Also, the study proffered measures to improve Nigerian built environment tertiary education accreditation ranking.

Data were sourced from elite virtual interviews across Nigeria. The interviewees were knowledgeable about Nigeria's built environment programmes accreditation, and many of them have been directly or indirectly involved. The investigators utilised a thematic analysis for the collated data and enhanced it with secondary sources.

The study revealed that several Nigerian academia in the built environment lack fame in research, publication, and citations due to barriers in their workplace. It has hindered their global institution's accreditation and ranking standards. Findings identified inadequate basic infrastructure, obsolete curricula, lack of research novelty, lack of higher education institutions funding, inadequate staffing and lax upskilling and reskilling, and unethical practices “systematic corruption” as major factors hindering BEPA. Also, findings proffered measures to improve Nigeria's BEPA global ranking.

The study is limited to the perceived barriers and measures to improve BEPA in the 21st-century in Nigeria via semi-structured virtual interviews. Future study is needed to validate the findings as highlighted in the thematic network.

The paper confirms that the BEPA requires innovative and multidisciplinary measures to improve the global ranking of these programmes and, by extension, the higher education institutions ranking globally. The paper would stir major stakeholders and advance the built environment programmes quality accreditation regarding international best practices and maintain the minimum standards.

The paper comprehensively analyses the perceived factors and proffered measures to improve Nigeria's BEPA in the 21st-century via a thematic network. The outcome intends to improve the global ranking and stir stakeholders to reposition and showcase Nigeria's built environment programmes to the world.

Digital uptake amongst construction organisations is described as slow and ineffective, undermining a fundamental transformation and limiting construction firms from exploiting the digital benefits. In this space, meaningful research that utilises a qualitative approach in pursuit for employees' insights towards digital transformation is lacking. Such limited focus from previous efforts presents an opportunity to illuminate the determinants of an effective digital transformation that are, arguably, responsible for the status quo of low digital uptake in the construction sector. This paper aims to discuss the aforementioned idea.

This study adopts a qualitative approach to address the literature's digital discreetness in construction. The qualitative approach captures employees' perspectives through its unbounded characteristic of encouraging illustration and discussion.

This paper captures 35 digital transformation determinants under three clusters, namely, organisation related, i.e. hierarchy, size and management, people related, i.e. team orientation, training and knowledge and leadership related, i.e. awareness, attitude, approach and leaders' characteristics. Findings suggest a new set of arguments in relation to understudied factors and their influence on the digital uptake in construction organisations.

This paper offers empirical indication of the determinants believed to influence an effective digital transformation in construction organisations. Such conceptualisation is crucial and is depicted as perceived by construction employees and practitioners, which is a less biased approach than that of comparable studies that argue the viewpoints of industry leaders in isolation of other members of the hierarchy.

Building on the “needs–affordances–features” framework, the authors explored how users are motivated by their needs to actualize the feature-enabled affordances and engage in the metaverse.

The data were collected through semi-structured and in-depth interviews with 35 participants. The authors applied thematic analysis to summarize the key features and affordances, supplemented by frequency analysis to explore the significance of the features. Sentiment analysis was employed to explicate the relationship between user affordance sentiments and engagement.

The key features of the metaverse portal components—hardware, software and content—afford user behaviors. The features of mechanics and physics engines are important for user engagement in the metaverse. The affordances are related to needs satisfaction and user engagement. Mental immersion was frequently mentioned by the participants, implying that it is significant to afford mental immersion in the metaverse.

The findings of the study provide a rich understanding for practitioners in the metaverse on how to use the features to afford user behaviors and engage them. The authors identified the key elements of user engagement that can be used to guide metaverse game designers.

This study provides a rich and systematic understanding of features, affordances, needs satisfaction and engagement in the metaverse. Going beyond a fragmented view, the findings conclude a research framework that weaves features, affordances, needs and engagement together.