What is PowerLearn? PowerLearn is an educational site dedicated to power engineering courseware that provides collection, quality control through peer-review, storage, and dissimination of various materials in a searchable fashion. The courseware is organized based on modules, and each module addresses a power engineering topic that could be covered within a college classroom using 1 to 6 fifty-minute class meetings.... The heart of a module, the student text, is similar to a textbook chapter, having description, examples, and problems. Presently, we have xx modules, each having a student text. Each module may also have associated with it any number of library elements, which may include anything that may exist as an electronic element, including other textual materials, digital photos and movies, or scanned elements. All module student texts are peer-reviewed.

What motivates PowerLearn? Although the PowerLearn modular approach and the associated site contents may be used for many different educational purposes, it has been designed to target the needs of the college-level course instructor, easing the burden of continuously adapting courseware while simultaneously taking advantage of the expertise of other power engineering colleagues around the world. The development and maintenance of a curriculum undergoes continuous and significant pressure to change due to changes in industry and state of the art technology together with accreditation and internal curricular needs. These pressures are felt most keenly by instructors responsible for teaching the various courses as they work to continuously construct new courses and maintain the content in existing courses, and this work always centers around courseware development. Traditionally, instructors respond to changing curricular needs in one of three ways:

1. adopt a new textbook
2. supplement current textbook with additional material generated by the instructor
3. write a new textbook

Approach 1 minimizes the effort, but it is usually a compromise solution because it is very difficult to find a textbook that exactly reflects the identified curricular needs. Approach 2 is almost always used at some point following adoption of a new textbook, in order to satisfy the curricular needs, but, like approach 3, it is very time consuming for the instructor. Thus, there is a real need, to provide a mechanism to efficiently maintain curricula without over-burdening the decreasing number of power engineering faculty capable of doing it. The PowerLearn approach directly addresses this need.

How does the PowerLearn approach facilitate curricula maintenance? An instructor begins the development of a course by identifying a set of topics and corresponding learning objectives for the course. The instructor then identifies PowerLearn modules addressing these topics, downloads them, and within hours has a first draft of the entire "textbook" for the course. Each downloaded module may be modified at will by the instructor in order to tailor them to the specific needs of the course. The class notes may then be supplied to the students via a web page or via sale at a local copying facility. And clearly, after a course has been modularized in this fashion, topics may be easily expanded or replaced with new ones in the future.

How do we intend that PowerLearn will evolve? Our goal is increase the number of PowerLearn modules to 400 by the end of 2003, with module contributions coming from university faculty and industry experts all over the world, and if you are one of these, then YOU are invited to contribute! Achievement of this goal will provide the power engineering community with a very rich resource for

responding quickly to changing curricular needs
maintaining state of the art learning objectives within the university "training grounds" for the future power engineers;
providing instructors with ability to draw upon expertise of colleagues outside their own immediate university environment, at other universities, and within industry, thereby strengthening the power engineering presence within each university environment;
facilitating the participation of industry experts in the development of materials utilized within university courses, and thus enabling the introduction in a significant way the  information, skills, and understanding of technology that is uniquely gained from industry experience.

Why should you contribute to the PowerLearn site? Four reasons - it is a professional contribution, it strengthens promotion and tenure cases, it documents expertise, and it is relatively easy. First, a contribution of a module to PowerLearn represents a significant professional contribution to the power engineering international community by enhancing the ability to attract and educate students in the exciting field of power engineering. Second, because contributed modules are peer reviewed, an accepted module represents a personal achievement that strengthens the promotion and tenure credentials for university faculty and therefore provides an excellent way for faculty to get credit for work done in preparing materials for classroom use. Third, university faculty or industry experts may want to document certain areas of expertise that they have gained to ensure the preservation of that expertise - this is a particular incentive for engineers nearing retirement. Finally, given that many people already have well-prepared notes on certain topics, the conversion of such notes is relatively painless, requiring an amount of work approximately equivalent to or less than the amount of work required to write a technical paper.