RENEWABLE ENERGY LAB AT THE FACULTY OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

Renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies are key to creating a clean energy future for not only the nation, but the world.
World Energy Consumption relies heavily on coal, oil, and natural gas. Fossil fuels are nonrenewable, that is, they draw on finite resources that will eventually dwindle, becoming too expensive or too environmentally damaging to retrieve. In contrast, renewable energy resources—such as wind and solar energy—are constantly replenished and will never run out.

Due to the rising need for professionals and academics with a background and understanding in the Renewable Energy field, developed at the "HIT -Institute of Technology" new program at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering. The Renewable Energy program gives the students technical and practical aspects of energy use (technology and methodology of the study) and energy efficiency. The program also deals with minimizing the environmental impacts of energy use, energy economy and environmental policy.

The Institute offers his students well-equipped laboratories and sophisticated photovoltaic energy and smart grid telecommunications and information security, wind and water energy laboratories and power electronics.

The Renewable Energy Laboratory is working under a new experimental teaching this is the "next generation" lab. The Lab is a "paperless" lab which means that all the experiments notes as well as the theoretical background are computerized. The notes and experiments are all integrated into the "Moodle" platform. The students read the theoretical material regarding their experiment in the course website in "Moodle". The students are examined in a computerized quiz, after they finished reading and understanding the theoretical material.

When the quiz is finalized and finished the file explaining the course of the experiment is then opens for them. The experiment is constructed out of few phases. Passing from one phase to the other is dependent on the finishing of the last phase. Each phase consist of experiment a computerized pre-prepared Google docs sheets which show dynamic graphs and can be supervised by the instructor. After each experiment is concluded the student must take a computerized test on the results and the conclusions of the experiment. This method is self-adjusting to the pace of each group and insures the understanding of the experiment in order the next phase. The system makes sure that the material the students experimented on will be well understood and it is considered as a level adjusting system.

When the students finish all phases of the experiment they basically finished and get an automatic grade with no report needed. The data of each stent is saved and can be analyzed at later stage.

Each student is filling an anonymous computerized feedback questioner at the end of all experiment. In this questioner they are asked about this new method of computerized experience learning. In this paper presented a summary of the results of the pilot conducted last four years.