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This study aims to explore the opportunities offered by interactive and situated learning (e-learning and m-learning) in support of education for sustainability in disciplines of the built environment.

The paper illustrates the development of an online portal and a mobile app aimed at promoting students’ motivation and engagement with sustainability in design, and discusses the outcomes of their testing, investigating users’ acceptance, comparing academic results and analysing feedback.

The findings add empirical evidence to the view that information and communication technology-enhanced pedagogies can substantially contribute to the agenda of sustainability in higher education, primarily due to their affordance of interactive communication and contextualisation of knowledge, while guaranteeing flexible time and pace of learning.

The study solely focused on the development and testing of e-learning and m-learning tools to foster students’ competence of sustainability in design studio work. The tools trialled were mostly at their prototypical stage and their testing included a relatively short-term evaluation and a narrow, self-selected, user base. However, the approach and findings are felt to be applicable to a much wider range of educational contexts.

Interactive and situated pedagogical methods and tools have the potential to prompt a departure from transmissive educational models, encompassing at once theoretical, experiential and analytic learning processes. This is of value to education for sustainability in disciplines of the built environment due to the requirement to holistically consolidate multi-/inter-/trans-disciplinary knowledge into a coherent design whole.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the co-movements between the Portuguese, Greek, Irish and German government bond markets after the subprime crisis (2007 to 2013), with a special focus on the European sovereign debt crisis. It aims to assess the existence of contagion between the Portuguese, Greece and Irish bond markets and to explore the phenomenon of flight-to-quality from the Portuguese and Greek bond markets to the German market.

The analysis is undertaken using a DCC-GARCH model with daily data for 10-year yield government bonds. The change in correlation from the stable periods to the crisis periods is used to identify contagion or flight-to-quality.

Results suggest that there was contagion between the Greek and Portuguese markets, and to a lesser extent between the Irish and Portuguese markets. During most of the identified crisis periods, there are evident flight-to-quality flows from the Portuguese and Greek bond markets to the German market.

This paper contributes to the literature by applying the methodology DCC-GARCH to several crisis episodes for the analysis of contagion and flight-to-quality during the European sovereign debt crisis.