Residents across the world's least developed regions often build homes with local materials, lacking basic health, sanitation, and safety standards, leaving them vulnerable to natural disasters. The university's third mission—its commitment to societal service and development—is beckoning academia to action. It urges cooperative efforts that can significantly improve the living conditions of disadvantaged communities. Actual human development must encompass all individuals and every aspect of their well-being. In this regard, service-learning approaches in Higher Education (HE) emerge as a valuable tool to raise outgoing students' awareness and promote societal competencies and skills.

This document presents an international cooperation experience driven by an alliance among teams of professors and researchers from universities in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Portugal and Spain to establish and share standard service-learning methodologies in engineering subjects related to adobe construction. Adobe is a sustainable building material composed of a natural mixture of clay-rich soil, water, and organic fibers, molded into bricks and sun‑dried. This alliance is meant to guide students’ learning about adobe structures, their materials, varieties, and types through promoting the study and completion of final degree projects, group work focused on challenge-based learning, and creative thinking.

This experience focuses on two primary targets:
1) elaborating a widespread collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) concerning the construction and strengthening of adobe family houses, and
2) implementing diverse service-learning activities in engineering and construction faculties so that students’ outcomes carry out societal benefits for the low-income communities that build their adobe houses in developing countries. This collaboration among universities aims to share knowledge, methods, and results to make them later available to local constructors and other HE institutions.

Firstly, an exhaustive search of technical and scientific literature on constructing adobe walls and houses has been carried out: manuals, recommendations, numerical analyses, mechanical tests, reinforcement types and procedures, material characterisation, and common types of structural failures. The results have been classified, and a repository is being developed to open publication.

Furthermore, since 2023, diverse teaching activities based on the service-learning model have been carried out in subjects taught by the project's teachers, focusing on methods for reinforcing adobe constructions. Those comprise Final Degree Projects (either Degree or Master's Degree ones), AI-guided research projects, computer simulations, and teamwork to analyse a variety of adobe construction features such as cases and examples of damage to adobe dwellings, failure mechanisms and causes, current reinforcing methods, modelling of the behaviour of adobe housing structures; and reinforcement guidelines for local master builders, among other topics.

Results boast tens of students with technical competencies in adobe construction and transverse competencies in societal, citizenship, and belongingness skills. They also include a series of technical documents elaborated by students and an ongoing repository of OER to be published during the next academic year. In addition, the alliance has strengthened and is enlarging with new partners.

Keywords: Educational Innovation, open educational resources, adobe housing, university third-mission, university service learning, international cooperation.