The Potential of the Hybrid Course Vis-a-Vis Online and Traditional Courses

Face-to-face, hybrid, and online courses are part of the panoply of course options available to students and teachers in the twenty-first century. This essay tackles the promise of hybrid courses for enhancing student learning in seminary contexts. The author contends that the introduction of hybrid instruction prompts faculty to revisit questions about pedagogy and improves student learning

Using Students Consultants to Re-envision Teaching Christian History and Theology

When it came time to reevaluate and restructure the introductory year in Christian history and theology, I decided to use a roundtable of student consultants to help me in that work. Our research and reflection focused on the impact of postmodern thinking and learning, feedback from pastors in ministry, a desire to bring appropriate praxis into academically focused courses, and a hope to make greater use of technology, This article discusses the consultative process and sketches out key learnings from student research. Concluding reflections focus on technology, a topical, praxis-oriented approach to teaching, the process of utilizing student advisors, and personal, internal changes that resulted from the project

Theological Education and Hybrid Models of Distance Learning

The authors document the rise of so-called hybrid models of distance education and articulate their relevance for theological education in North America. In the first section, the authors lay out a typology of the visions for technology current among theological educators. One feature of this typology is the recognition of two very different ways of thinking about distance education. Early-stage thinking is characterized by a strong dichotomy between online and face-to-face courses. Later-stage thinking has tended toward the development of hybrid programs. The following sections explore the history of the development of hybrid models and how hybrid courses and programs work. In two final sections, the authors ponder the possible strengths of hybrid programs for theological education and the issue of hybrid models and ATS accreditation standards. A close reading of the current ATS standards for distance education reveals that they have been crafted according to models that are both outmoded in terms of their pedagogical sophistication and less than fully relevant to the ways in which distance programs are actually being developed by seminaries in North America

Intermittent electron density and temperature fluctuations and associated fluxes in the Alcator C-Mod scrape-off layer

The Alcator C-Mod mirror Langmuir probe system has been used to sample data time series of fluctuating plasma parameters in the outboard mid-plane far scrape-off layer. We present a statistical analysis of one second long time series of electron density, temperature, radial electric drift velocity and the corresponding particle and electron heat fluxes. These are sampled during stationary plasma conditions in an ohmically heated, lower single null diverted discharge. The electron density and temperature are strongly correlated and feature fluctuation statistics similar to the ion saturation current. Both electron density and temperature time series are dominated by intermittent, large-amplitude burst with an exponential distribution of both burst amplitudes and waiting times between them. The characteristic time scale of the large-amplitude bursts is approximately 15{\mu}s. Large-amplitude velocity fluctuations feature a slightly faster characteristic time scale and appear at a faster rate than electron density and temperature fluctuations. Describing these time series as a superposition of uncorrelated exponential pulses, we find that probability distribution functions, power spectral densities as well as auto-correlation functions of the data time series agree well with predictions from the stochastic model. The electron particle and heat fluxes present large-amplitude fluctuations. For this low-density plasma, the radial electron heat flux is dominated by convection, that is, correlations of fluctuations in the electron density and radial velocity. Hot and dense blobs contribute approximately 6% of the total fluctuation driven heat flux

Statistical properties of fluctuation driven flows in the outboard mid-plane SOL of Alcator C-Mod

The scale length of the radial density profile in scrape-off layer plasmas has been shown to depend on the line-averaged plasma density. While first reported on AlcatorC-Mod, recent work verifies this phenomena in JET and ASDEX Upgrade. In low density plasmas with a sheath-limited SOL, the density profiles present a two-scale structure which allows the separation of the SOL into two distinct regions. While the near SOL presents a small profile length scale, the far-SOL presents a flat density profile length scale. Transitioning into detached divertor conditions by increasing the line-averaged plasma density, the density profile features a shallow length scale. In this contribution, AlcatorC-Mods Mirror Langmuir Probe system is used to investigate the radial profiles as well as the statistical properties of flucutations in the electron density, temperature, as well as the fluctuation driven fluxes

Blob shapes in the scrape-off layer: Comparison of measurements to simulations

Poster fra konferanse

Universality of intermittent fluctuations in the Alcator C-Mod scrape-off layer

Conference presentatio

Orientifolds in N=2 Liouville Theory and its Mirror

We consider unoriented strings in the supersymmetric SL(2,R)/U(1) coset, which describes the two-dimensional Euclidean black hole, and its mirror dual N=2 Liouville theory. We analyze the orientifolds of these theories from several complementary points of view: the parity symmetries of the worldsheet actions, descent from known AdS_3 parities, and the modular bootstrap method (in some cases we can also check our results against known constraints coming from the conformal bootstrap method). Our analysis extends previous work on orientifolds in Liouville theory, the AdS_3 and SU(2) WZW models and minimal models. Compared to these cases, we find that the orientifolds of the two dimensional Euclidean black hole exhibit new intriguing features. Our results are relevant for the study of orientifolds in the neighborhood of NS5-branes and for the engineering of four-dimensional chiral gauge theories and gauge theories with SO and Sp gauge groups with suitable configurations of D-branes and orientifolds. As an illustration, we discuss an example related to a configuration of D4-branes and O4-planes in the presence of two parallel fivebranes.Comment: 47 pages, 2 figures; v2 typos fixed, refs added, improved discussion of Hanany-Witten setup