The article discusses a year‐long outreach activity, “Sparking interest in German.” Five University of Utah German students engaged in the AATG/Goethe‐Institut‐sponsored SPARK program and taught German to local middle schoolers. At the heart of this outreach project were questions such as whether student‐run outreach programs could truly spark interest in German among middle school students and whether outreach projects administered via service learning or practicum courses offer our college students a viable academic experience. The article describes the structure of the program, student learning activities, and assesses whether the goals were reached. At the end of the project, parents, middle schoolers, and university students were highly satisfied with the SPARK program and recommended continuation of the program.

Yet despite the continuing problem of scaling these internet-based teaching and learning models, technology-based innovation is here to stay and education will need to think of itself within the context of new delivery modalities. Among these are hybrid courses that combine traditional face-to-face (F2F) teaching with online instruction-often called "the best of both worlds" (Seaman & Allen, 2010). Educators and administrators alike are turning toward these new delivery modalities and are weighing carefully whether online and hybrid teaching can work successfully for the foreign language classroom. Will this model respond to the imperatives of cost (overflowing Spanish classes, shrinking German classes) and student demand for flexibility (anytime, anywhere)? Some even argue that hybrid instruction is "quickly becoming an essential alternative in many FL programs" (Rubio & Thoms, 2014, p. 1).The outcomes of the course described here, a fourth-semester German language course, are of interest because mine are the experiences of a fairly average mid-career faculty member trained mostly in literary studies. The German program at the University of Utah is typical in many ways: We are a small language program within a large multi-sectional department. The three full-time tenure-track faculty teaching in German are the ones left after the crisis of 2008 when older colleagues retired and the vacant German positions either went unfilled or were absorbed into growing language fields. 1 Our problems are fairly typical, too. We are losing students at all levels, have revised the curriculum several times in order to attract more students to our courses, and struggle to overcome the language-literature divide described in the 2007 MLA report. Our curriculum is divided between a required four-semester, language-based, lower-level sequence taught by a dedicated lecturer and several adjunct teachers and culture-based upper-level major and minor courses taught by tenure-track faculty, with some overlap on an individual basis. Although instructors and tenure-track faculty alike take great care to stay abreast of new developments in teaching, it has been many years since faculty members have taken a course in pedagogy. At stake in our experimenting with hybrid course delivery was therefore the question of whether implementing hybrid courses can be done by the average mid-career faculty member trained in the delivery of traditional F2F language courses. By focusing on the experiences of the faculty instructor, I am not disputing the pedagogical impera-211 1 The German section has four full-time tenure-track faculty members, with one faculty serving in an administrative capacity. The tenure-track faculty is supported by one full-time lecturer and a small cadre of dedicated adjuncts.

This article describes a five‐week module on “Switzerland as a multi‐ethnic society” intended to counteract the popular image of Switzerland as a homogenous country concerned mostly with tourism, chocolate, and watches. Instead, the module treats Switzerland through topics such as the definition of identity in a multi‐ethnic society, the politics of immigration for a largely service‐based economy, and the strains that migration puts on a modern society shaped by political will. The unit seeks to familiarize students with contemporary multi‐ethnic Switzerland through a number of different texts (including film and music), compare the Swiss debates of migration and integration to those in the United States, and move students toward deep reflection on the larger issue concerning migration and national identity. The module is versatile in that it can be taught as part of a course on Switzerland, or of a broader course on migration in the German‐speaking countries.

Plasmatechnologische Prozesse in der modernen Dünnschichttechnologie zur Veredelung von Oberflächen erlangen einen ständig wachsenden Stellenwert. Dünnschichttechniken nutzen in der Hauptsache vakuum‐, ionen‐ und plasmatechnische Verfahren zur Oberflächenmodifikation und Schichtdeposition. Insbesondere plasmatechnologische Verfahrenskonzepte im industriellen Bereich verlangen an die industriellen Erfordernisse angepaßte, großflächige und skalierbare Plasmaquellen. Ein neuartiges Quellenkonzept, basierend auf einer koaxialen Struktur, vereint diese Vorgaben und erlaubt beliebig ausgedehnte und flächige Plasma‐Anordnungen.

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