A sound education: using podcasts to develop study skills

Coping with the demands of academic study at university level can be a challenging experience for many students, and effective study skills are crucial in achieving academic success. However, librarians and teachers in higher education will know that it is not always easy to engage students in developing their study skills. How can we find new ways of stimulating the interest of our students? An innovative approach to teaching and the exploitation of new technologies can provide solutions and ideas. Podcasting has been very popular in recent years for delivering entertainment, news and other information, but podcasts are also extensively used in education, enabling students to watch or listen at a time that suits them – at home, at work or while travelling. The Skills for learning website was established over ten years ago as part of the library service at Leeds Metropolitan University to support the teaching and learning of study skills. The website offers students a wide range of resources including topics such as academic writing, time management, group skills, reflection and how to do research. There is also a team of tutors who provide workshops and tutorials. We felt that a podcast series could provide an alternative and flexible way of delivering study skills support that might appeal to a new audience. The podcasts could also be used as a stimulus in classroom teaching. As they are usually released episodically, we hoped that subscribers or visitors to our podcast page would become ‘hooked’ on the series and want to tune in to future podcasts. All the podcasts were created in-house by members of the Skills for learning team

Personal propulsion unit Patent

Lightweight propulsion unit for movement of personnel and equipment across lunar surfac

Investigation of single crystal microwave acoustical delay line materials Final report

Single crystals for microwave acoustical equipment improved by MgO dopin

Magnesium oxide doping reduces acoustic wave attenuation in lithium metatantalate and lithium metaniobate crystals

Single crystals of lithium metatantalate and lithium metaniobate, grown from melts having different stoichiometries and different amounts of magnesium oxide, show that doping lowers temperature-independent portion of attenuation of acoustic waves. Doped crystals possess optical properties well suited for electro-optical and photoelastic applications

The Acoustic Peak in the Lyman Alpha Forest

We present the first simulation of the signature of baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in Lyman alpha forest data containing 180,000 mock quasar sight-lines. We use eight large dark-matter only simulations onto which we paint the Lyman alpha field using the fluctuating Gunn-Peterson approximation. We argue that this approach should be sufficient for the mean signature on the scales of interest. Our results indicate that Lyman alpha flux provides a good tracer of the underlying dark matter field on large scales and that redshift space distortions are well described by a simple linear theory prescription. We compare Fourier and configuration space approaches to describing the signal and argue that configuration space statistics provide useful data compression. We also investigate the effect of a fluctuating photo-ionizing background using a simplified model and find that such fluctuations do add smooth power on large scales. The acoustic peak position is, however, unaffected for small amplitude fluctuations (<10%). Larger amplitude fluctuations make the recovery of the BAO signal more difficult and may degrade the achievable significance of the measurement.Comment: 10 pages, 8 figures; v2: minor revision matching version accepted by JCAP (new references, better figures, clarifications