Universities are facing many challenges with growing student numbers and a need to modify the traditional lecture and tutorial-based face-to-face pedagogical style both for students who work full-time while studying and for international students who may have language difficulties. To address these challenges, a flipped classroom pedagogical model was trialled in a second-year module in a Construction Management undergraduate degree program. The model consisted of preclass online quizzes, in-class face-to-face lectures, group tasks, active learning spaces, adaptive online tutorials and a case-based assessment. Evaluation findings suggest that preclass activities are an important feature of a flipped classroom to actively engage students in independent learning and to help them construct their own knowledge. Findings also highlight the significance of physical space to facilitate collaboration and interactions between students, improve their learning experience, and inspire students to learn in an active environment. The findings have implications for both educational developers and academics to support the development of open, online, and blended learning courses and to deploy, implement, and evaluate higher education courses.

Ecosystem services provide essential services for cities and are key factors in achieving many of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Such services are best delivered through green infrastructure, which works in resourceful, multifunctional, synergistic, and environmentally sensitive ways to deliver ecosystem services and provide alternative cleaner pathways for the delivery of multiple urban services. It is unclear if current research supports the necessary linkages between ecosystem services, cities, and green infrastructure in order to achieve the SDGs. To answer this question, we conducted a systematic review analysing 3392 studies on the SDGs from the WoS database. The contents of 66 of those with relevance to ecosystem services and urban research were reviewed in depth. We applied network-analytic methods to map the relationships of different knowledge clusters of SDGs research (1) across time, (2) across disciplines, and (3) in relation to ecosystem services and cities. The results of our analysis show that research on the SDGs have developed stronger networks from 2010–2018, but this research has not been sustained. Further, whilst research on cities now occupies a central place in the SDGs literature, research on ecosystem services only shows tentative links to both green-infrastructure research and SDGs research. Such literature on urban green infrastructure remains peripheral to the central challenge of sustainable urban transitions. We conclude that when it comes to the SDGs, research articles typically consider urban services independently of green infrastructure. Further, it suggests that green infrastructure is not generally considered as a sustainable alternative to conventional urban infrastructures. To address this serious shortcoming, we recommend transdisciplinary approaches to link urban ecosystem and urban green infrastructure research to the 2030 global sustainability agenda.

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