The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a drastic shift of face-to-face teaching and learning to remote/online teaching and learning at all levels of education worldwide. Active student engagement is always a challenging task for educators regardless of the teaching modalities. The degree of challenge for active student engagement increases significantly in remote/online teaching and learning. This paper presents a framework that implements activities/strategies to ensure active student engagement in remote/online teaching and learning during this COVID-19 pandemic. The structure of the developed framework combines the balanced use of adjusted teaching pedagogy, educational technologies, and an e-learning management system. Teaching pedagogy involves various active learning techniques, synchronous teaching, asynchronous teaching, and segmentation. The educational technologies, such as Google Meet, Jamboard, Google Chat, Breakout room, Mentimeter, Moodle, electronic writing devices, etc., enable the developed framework for active student engagement. An e-learning management system, Moodle, is used for course management purposes. Over the last three semesters (Fall 2020, Spring 2021, and Summer 2021), the framework is tested for three different engineering courses. A questionnaire draws out student perception on the developed framework in terms of active student engagement that ensures student–student interactions, student–instructor interactions, social presence, reinforces learning and deepens understanding of the materials in remote teaching. The feedback also indicates that combining the utilized technologies, synchronous teaching, and active learning activities in the developed framework is effective for interactive learning; hence a practical approach for active student engagement in remote/online teaching and learning. The article focuses on contributing to present research and infusing future research direction about technology-enhanced active student engagement in Engineering Education.

In recent years, the penetration of renewable power generations into the electrical grid has substantially increased. Continuous deployment of power electronic-based distributed generations and the reduction of traditional synchronous machines with their essential dynamics in modern power networks are very critical in this change. The use of power electronic inverters leads to the dissociation of sources and loads and lowering the power system inertia. Under power imbalance, this drop causes an elevated rate of change in frequency and frequency divergences, which has a notable impact on the system’s frequency stability. As a result, enhanced control techniques for grid-tied electronic converters are required to secure the power system’s stability and support. The virtual-synchronous generator (VSG) control is used to mimic the dynamics of a rotating synchronous generator and improve the power system’s stability. In this article, the problems of such low-inertia power systems, as well as the VSG technologies, are explored. This research also looks at different control orders and strategies for virtual-synchronous generators (VSG). In addition, the utilization of energy storage and critical matters in VSG and further research recommendations are explained.

The Smart Grid (SG) is considered as an imminent future power network because of its fault identification and self-healing capabilities. Energy sustainability, renewable energy integration and an efficient control system are the key factors to be considered in developing SG system. Among various SG concepts, the term virtual power plant (VPP) integrates renewable energy to the grid and provides higher operational flexibility, but it requires extra capital costs for control system and software. The operational activities of a smart grid largely depend on the active customer demands. This paper defines and discusses various SG system concepts such as virtual power plant, and active demand in consumer networks, and also presents drivers and roadmaps for development of smart grids worldwide. Furthermore, this work provides an insight into present research and development on smart grids around the world, and sheds light on developing and establishing SG for the Sultanate of Oman.

Duqm is located in the Al Wasta Governorate in Oman and is currently fed by 10 diesel generators with a total capacity of around 76 MW and other rental power sources with a size of 18 MW. To make the electric power supply come completely from renewables, one novel solution is to replace the diesel with hydrogen. The extra energy coming from the PV-wind system can be utilized to produce green hydrogen that will be utilized by the fuel cell. Measured data of solar insolation, hourly wind speeds, and hourly load consumption are used in the proposed system. Finding an ideal configuration that can match the load demand and be suitable from an economic and environmental point of view was the main objective of this research. The Hybrid Optimization Model for Multiple Energy Resources (HOMER Pro) microgrid software was used to evaluate the technical and financial performance. The findings demonstrated that the suggested hybrid system (PV-wind-fuel cell) will remove CO₂ emissions at a cost of energy (COE) of USD 0.436/kWh and will reduce noise. With a total CO₂ emission of 205,676,830 kg/year, the levelized cost of energy for the current system is USD 0.196/kWh. The levelized cost for the diesel system will rise to USD 0.243/kWh when taking 100 US dollars per ton of CO₂ into account. Due to system advantages, the results showed that using solar, wind, and fuel cells is the most practical and cost-effective technique. The results of this research illustrated the feasibility and effectiveness of utilizing wind and solar resources for both hydrogen and energy production and also suggested that hydrogen is a more cost-effective long-term energy storage option than batteries.