Curriculum innovation: pragmatic approaches to transforming learning and teaching through technologies

This report draws together outcomes from the JISC Curriculum Delivery Programme on behalf of JISC and includes recommendations for further investigation.

Open Media Classes at Coventry University: Final Evaluation Report 2015

This report offers a reflection on findings from a one year evaluation study into the distributed open media classes at Coventry University The study team comprised Lou McGill and Tim Gray of Lou McGill Consultancy Ltd. This report is augmented by an open wiki (bit.ly/1KqL4nH) which includes more detail about the approaches used during the study and findings are also presented as a series of web pages (comc.loumcgill.co.uk). We would like to thank the Department of Media in the School of Art and Design for their input, openness and patience during the study.

Online Learning Readiness Tool Guide

A user guide for the Online Learning Readiness Tool, developed as part of the Jisc Scaling up online learning project.

A theory of strong and weak scintillations with applications to astrophysics

The propagation of waves in an extended, irregular medium is studied under the "quasi-optics" and the "Markov random process" approximations. Under these assumptions, a Fokker-Planck equation satisfied by the characteristic functional of the random wave field is derived. A complete set of the moment equations with different transverse coordinates and different wavenumbers is then obtained from the characteristic functional. The derivation does not require Gaussian statistics of the random medium and the result can be applied to the time-dependent problem. We then solve the moment equations for the phase correlation function, angular broadening, temporal pulse smearing, intensity correlation function, and the probability distribution of the random waves. The necessary and sufficient conditions for strong scintillation are also given.

We also consider the problem of diffraction of waves by a random, phase-changing screen. The intensity correlation function is solved in the whole Fresnel diffraction region and the temporal pulse broadening function is derived rigorously from the wave equation.

The method of smooth perturbations is applied to interplanetary scintillations. We formulate and calculate the effects of the solar-wind velocity fluctuations on the observed intensity power spectrum and on the ratio of the observed "pattern" velocity and the true velocity of the solar wind in the three-dimensional spherical model. The r.m.s. solar-wind velocity fluctuations are found to be ~200 km/sec in the region about 20 solar radii from the Sun.

We then interpret the observed interstellar scintillation data using the theories derived under the Markov approximation, which are also valid for the strong scintillation. We find that the Kolmogorov power-law spectrum with an outer scale of 10 to 100 pc fits the scintillation data and that the ambient averaged electron density in the interstellar medium is about 0.025 cm^-3. It is also found that there exists a region of strong electron density fluctuation with thickness ~10 pc and mean electron density ~7 cm^-3 between the PSR 0833-45 pulsar and the earth.

Photonic nanowires directly drawn from bulk glasses

High-uniform nanowires with diameters down to 50 nm are directly taper-drawn from bulk glasses. Typical loss of these wires goes down to 0.1 dB/mm for single-mode operation. Favorable photonic properties such as high index for tight optical confinement in tellurite glass nanowires and photoluminescence for active devices in doped fluoride and phosphate glass nanowires are observed. Supporting high-index tellurite nanowires with solid substrates (such as silica glass and MgF2 crystal) and assembling low-loss microcoupler with these wires are also demonstrated. Photonic nanowires demonstrated in this work may open up vast opportunities for making versatile building blocks for future micro- and nanoscale photonic circuits and components. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.

Materials and devices toward three-dimensional integration

It has been shown that the apparent benefits of a two-layer stacked SOI system, i.e. packing density and speed improvements, are less than could be expected in the context of a VLSI requirement [1]. In this project the stacked SOI system has been identified as having major application in the realization of integrated, mixed technology systems. Zone-melting-recrystallization (ZMR) with lasers and electron beams have been used to produce device quality SOI material and a small test-bed circuit has been designed as a demonstration of the feasibility of this approach. © 1988.