A B-Learning New Approach Applied to a Practical Power Electronics Converters Course

An Industrial Electronic discipline, involving different topics and technologies was designed to improve the sequence of activities within the available time and learning resources. The b-learning new methodology, applied in the University of Vigo, Spain, is composed of lectures, self-study sessions, quizzes, design problems, emulations, and laboratory sessions, integrated to achieve a better pedagogical environment. Most of the resources are available online without time restrictions, thus providing the students the opportunity to choose where and when they can learn, interact with the emulators, the remote laboratory and self-evaluate. Five flexible and powerful emulators have been developed for the buck, boost, buck-boost, forward and flyback converters. Emulation sessions provide a fast and easy path to understand the required concepts. The laboratory sessions are implemented by means of existing automatic test equipment (ATE), drive by a dedicated online server with new specific custom made software. The students provided positive evaluations of the methodology, and achieved a better degree of knowledge acquisition. Nowadays students from the University of Minho, Portugal, are also using remotely the set of resources available. The future work on this methodology will integrate the resources developed in both universities, to include more aspects of power electronics converters.