Open educational resource model in solar energy through e-Education

Online education is expanding rapidly as a vehicle to engage students distributed widely about the world, yet who are full of passion to enter the renewable energy workplace with practical skills. This is particularly important with increasing interest for young professionals seeking entry into the renewable energy field. While Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have a significant role in raising the visibility for popular topics, there is an additional goal to be served by traditional online courses, in particular those served via an open educational model. We present the case of a new course: "Solar Resource Assessment and Economics" including the respective computational tools and data sets used. The content is open to the public through Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences' Open Educational Resource Initiative (http://open.ems.psu.edu) associated with the inter-college Master of Professional Studies in Renewable Energy and Sustainability Systems (RESS). The computational tools used are open source, and the full course content is available through Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-Alike licensing, with the understanding that the content can and should be reused and modified to expand solar education in other institutions. This case has emerged as a modern generation of graduate education in renewable energy and sustainability systems to provide professionally oriented technical education that enables graduates to lead the transformation of the economy to a renewable and sustainable basis. The guiding educational objective is to impart technical understanding and advanced project development skills, within the framework of sustainability systems integrative with renewable energy.