A Blended Learning Approach to Enhance Student Learning for an Introductory Power Systems Course

This Innovation Practice Category Work-in-Progress Paper presents the implementation and results of a blended learning approach to design an introductory Power System Course to enhance student learning and pique their interest. The focus of this research is to develop a blended learning framework that converts the student from a passive listener to an active learner. Firstly, the lectures were moved online but instead of covering one topic and all the sub-topics in one video we covered each sub-topic in a separate video. This resulted in four to five videos a week between five to ten minutes. The shorter videos ensure that students learn the individual sub-topics before their attention gets divided. The classroom time was spent in relating the theory taught in the videos to practical real-life applications, live demonstrations of the concepts as well as solving mathematical tutorials. Secondly, a graded online quiz is conducted every two or three weeks that tests students on the video’s contents. Thirdly, quizzes with a competitive element built in are conducted during the classroom time to revise and reiterate the concepts covered that week. Quantitative and qualitative analysis show promising results on the implementation of blended learning in power systems.