Higher Education 4.0: The Digital Transformation of Classroom Lectures to Blended Learning

Published by the Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. in 2021, the book entitled “Higher Education 4.0 : The Digital Transformation of Classroom Lectures to Blended Learning” by Kevin Anthony Jones and Ravi S. Sharma presents an enlightening research for seeking out the impact of changing the instructional design from traditional lecturing to blended learning on the students’ academic achievements. As professional teacher and researchers of English in education, we read this book with particular interests, believing that it is a well-timed international publication under the global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on teaching forms. The book under review exhibits a well-organized research project based on scientific experiment model, indicating the objectives, scope, methodology and findings of the research through 7 chapters. It provides readers with a thrilling opportunity to dig out the influencing factors in academic performances of students due to the teaching design transition. Besides, the significant findings can help improve the blended learning model. We believe this book is an essential guidance for future digital teaching and would appeal to educators and researchers

Optimal Dynamical Decoupling Sequence for Ohmic Spectrum

We investigate the optimal dynamical decoupling sequence for a qubit coupled to an ohmic environment. By analytically computing the derivatives of the decoherence function, the optimal pulse locations are found to satisfy a set of nonlinear equations which can be easily solved. These equations incorporates the environment information such as high-energy (UV) cutoff frequency \omega_c, giving a complete description of the decoupling process. The solutions explain previous experimental and theoretical results of locally optimized dynamical decoupling (LODD) sequence in high-frequency dominated environment, which were obtained by purely numerical computation and experimental feedback. As shown in numerical comparison, these solutions outperform the Uhrig dynamical decoupling (UDD) sequence by one or more orders of magnitude in the ohmic case.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev.