An online portal for collaborative learning and teaching for power engineering education

This paper describes a web-based portal of peer-ranked sites on power engineering for educational purposes. It is a free and open resource consortium for faculty and students in power engineering. As the Internet is developing into a main educational tool, this multimedia-based application offers the educator and the student access to numerous power engineering resources. While it is possible to obtain information using one of the many popular Internet search engines, the results may not be relevant to the desired search topic. The portal described in this paper has individual hyperlinks to various web sites on power engineering that have previously been reviewed and ranked by both established faculty and students according to the versatility of each site. Peer-ranking influences the users' choice for extracting relevant information. Qualitative and quantitative statistical indexes are utilized to rank the web sites. Educators may use the resources available on the portal for educational purposes in a classroom setting. An analysis of the effectiveness of this portal on power engineering education is also offered in the paper.