Blend and Flip for Teaching Indonesian Students

The Australia-Indonesia Centre (AIC) is holding a webinar on Indonesia’s international education potential, 27 May. This will look at what Australia’s education providers can do in Indonesia, post COVID-19.

"Some institutions and businesses have seen an opportunity and patiently created a presence offshore, including in Indonesia. So how can Indonesia be part of the sector’s recovery? What are the key challenges faced in capturing opportunities in the country? Will the impact of COVID19 force a re-think in a sector that has been struggling with market diversity?  How can successfully navigate those challenges?" From Indonesia’s international education potential, AIC, 2020

As it happens I spoke at an international education conference in Yogyakarta, last December about one way Austrlaian higher educiaon instutions could provide training in Indonesia, do this, with blended leanring. The idea is internional students work in cross-cultural teams online and in person, as is already done at ANU in Canberra:

Blend and Flip for Teaching Communication Skills to Final Year International Computer Science Students, Tom Worthington, 2018 IEEE International Conference on Teaching, Assessment, and Learning for Engineering (TALE). In Press. Preprint and Presentation notes available.

Microgrids Powering Australia and Indonesia

Greetings from the ANU University House at the Australian National University in Canberra, where I am taking part in a workshop with researchers from Indonesia on micro-grids to power our nations. The workshop is run by the AIC Energy Research Cluster of the Australia-Indonesia Centre.

A microgrid has small electricity generators connected to a local load. The microgrid can be connected to a larger national grid, or operate autonomously. In my graduate course "ICT Sustainability" I teach how to estimate the energy used by computers and telecommunication and, more importantly for micro-grids, how to reduce energy consumption by using ICT. Micro-grids depend on having computer systems to ensure the production and consumption of power are balanced. I will be looking at how to keep and analyze the large amounts of data needed to do this for Indonesia and Australia.

One option I have suggested is displaying energy data using mobile phone compatible web pages. Some buildings have flat screen displays dedicated to energy monitoring, but these are rarely looked at and themselves consume energy (and cost money).   A small simple web page can be displayed on a smart phone. To check it is compatible you can use the
W3C mobileOK Checker (the Australian W3C Office is at ANU).   

Some work has been done in the USA on energy data analysis:

• Energy DataBus: From the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). They provide free software to collect and report energy-related data.
• Standard Energy Efficiency Data (SEED) Platform: Open source software for managing data on building energy performance. 
• Building Energy Management Open Source Software: BEMOSS is US Government funded and from Virginia Polytechnic. There is a paper describing the project (Khamphanchai et al, 2014), which includes a section on Data Management. The authors selected the Simple Measurement and Actuation Profile (sMAP) for time-series data.

One I idea I suggested to the workshop was to clone the ANU TechLauncher program and the Canberra Innovation Network for energy start-ups in Indonesia.

ps: It is an interesting time to be doing this, as Australia has a new government today, which may have new policies on climate change and energy use.

References

Khamphanchai, W., Saha, A., Rathinavel, K., Kuzlu, M., Pipattanasomporn, M., Rahman, S., ... & Haack, J. (2014, October). Conceptual architecture of building energy management open source software (BEMOSS). In Innovative Smart Grid Technologies Conference Europe (ISGT-Europe), 2014 IEEE PES (pp. 1-6). IEEE. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISGTEurope.2014.7028784