Coming to grips with energy systems

![CDATA[At UWS, the School of Engineering offers energy systems units at undergraduate and postgraduate courses. The energy systems units encompassed an introduction to electric power systems under normal and abnormal operating conditions, along with an introduction to power electronics. Delivery was via the usual lecture, laboratory and practical but with emphasis on continuous assessment through multiple choice homework questions and through three short quizzes, also multiple choice, spread throughout the teaching session of 14 weeks. Content was adapted over the four years from 2008 to 2010 in line with recommendations by the accrediting body, Engineers Australia. In 2010 there was also a shift to criteria based assessment. In 2008 concept maps were introduced to assist learning. Instead of handing out solutions to set tutorial problems, the concept map was used to guide the students to solutions. In this way the students would have to interpret the concept map, with some even preferring to create their own, and to produce a quantified solution on their own; the resulting solution would be one that the students would feel they had complete ownership over. At the end of the 2008 teaching session, the feedback from students in that year ranged from 3.4 to 4.4 in a rating scale out of 5. In later years the emphasis on the use of the concept map was much less and the ratings in the student feedback on units was also found to be lower. Whether or not it was just the peculiarity of the cohorts is not clear. This paper provides more detail of developments and proposed future iterations.]]