GOING THE DISTANCE: ADDRESSING A SHORTAGE OF POWER ENGINEERS

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- An award-wining paper by a University of Arkansas professor shows how universities are collaborating to address difficult educational issues in power engineering.

Stories about rolling black-outs and a shortage of electricity-generation plants lead the news almost daily. However, many universities have reduced or eliminated their power engineering programs, producing a shortage of engineers trained to meet these critical issues.

In "Collaborative Distance Education in Power Engineering," Kraig Olejniczak, professor of electrical engineering, and his co-authors describe an innovative, multi-university program that uses several distance education techniques to address a shortage of faculty and course offerings in power engineering.

"Utility restructuring has significantly altered the power systems engineering arena in both planning and operation," Olejniczak explained. "Power engineering education must also expand to encompass these changes. Unfortunately, over the past two decades, electrical engineering has focused on computers, communication and microelectronics and moved away from power engineering."

This move resulted in the elimination of many power engineering programs, according to Olejniczak. Of those that remain, the one or two faculty in the area cannot cover all of the timely and relevant topics and are frequently forced to teach and advise students in areas outside of their expertise.

To compensate, Olejniczak and faculty from Purdue, the University of Missouri-Rolla and Kansas State University developed and offered two senior/graduate level courses in flexible power system control. It was sponsored by a Combined Research and Curriculum Development Award from the National Science Foundation.

The courses were taught simultaneously to the students at the four campuses over four semesters. Course materials, including a hypertextbook developed specifically for these courses, are on a website at: www.ece.umr.edu/~power/Flex_Cont.html. Students were also supplied e-mail addresses for one another and all faculty members.

The faculty team identified real-time student/faculty interaction and flexibility of lecture format as their most important criteria. They also were very concerned with cost effectiveness, ease of use and encouraging collaboration between students.

To ensure maximum classroom flexibility, the faculty used a variety of distance education media -- Internet, videotapes, videoconferencing and data-conferencing. Each of these methods presented its own technological challenges and received mixed reactions from both students and faculty.

Students disliked videotapes and were generally negative about videoconferencing because of the poor video quality. Faculty members were frustrated with the difficulty in prompting student interaction. However, as the courses were taught and expanded over the semesters, they developed techniques to overcome these problems. At the end of four semesters, the approach was deemed successful by faculty and students.

"This approach enables students to have access to a wider range of expertise and materials than they otherwise could," said Olejniczak. "Course-sharing can be an exciting way to increase the breadth of upper-level power engineering courses."

Olejniczak and co-authors M.L. Crow of the University of Missouri-Rolla, S.D. Sudhoff of Purdue and A. Pahwa and S.K. Starrett of Kansas State University received the Prize Paper Award by the Power Engineering Education Committee at the IEEE Power Engineering Society Annual Meeting on Feb. 1