ISEP Students Win National SECOVE Competition with a MOOC on Hybrid Solar Energy

A team of Master’s students from the School of Engineering of the Polytechnic of Porto (ISEP/IPP) has won the national round of the SECOVE Student Applied Research Competition with an innovative Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) dedicated to hybrid solar energy. The winning project transformed technical renewable-energy content into an accessible, fully online learning experience and, in its pilot run, achieved a completion rate of 73.3%, far above the 5–15% typical of most MOOCs.

Organised by the Portuguese Sustainability Innovation Hub at ISEP, the competition is part of SECOVE (Sustainable Energy Centres of Vocational Excellence), an Erasmus+ initiative co-funded by the European Union that brings together universities, vocational training providers, industry and public bodies around the green and digital transition. First-year students of the Master’s Degree in Informatics Engineering (MEI) were challenged to turn industry-defined sustainability topics into high-quality digital learning content that complies with real MOOC-platform requirements.

The themes were defined together with the Hub’s SME partners, Abora, DUAL, Energaia and P2RG, and ranged from circular economy and energy audits to smart monitoring of energy storage and hybrid solar power. Working under a work-based learning model with weekly milestones, formal evaluation and genuine platform constraints, each team built a complete course from the ground up.

The winning entry, “MOOC on Hybrid Solar Energy Systems,” was developed by Francisca Silva and Rui Marinho around photovoltaic-thermal (PVT) technology. Structured into four modules, fundamentals, system components, installation and maintenance, and environmental and economic analysis. The course combines video lessons with interactive quizzes and immersive 3D environments created with Matterport. It was built on a custom web platform (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) with a Supabase backend and, notably, a bespoke Learning Analytics Dashboard that lets instructors track engagement, performance and difficulty in real time.

In its pilot deployment the course attracted 15 learners and recorded 190 quiz submissions, enabling the team to identify learning difficulties and pinpoint where the course could be improved, a data-driven approach the evaluators highlighted as a key innovation.

Projects were assessed against the SECOVE criteria of Excellence, Impact and Applicability, following a structured academic grading process. Representatives of the Portuguese SECOVE partners were invited to the final presentations, and several companies expressed strong interest in the students’ solutions. Organisers noted that the initiative shows how MOOCs can disseminate sustainable-energy knowledge at scale and at low marginal cost, while strengthening the link between higher education, industry and society.

The result, the Hub’s coordination team underlined, confirms the role of Innovation Hubs in fostering student innovation aligned with real societal challenges, an approach designed to be replicated and scaled across other educational contexts in Europe.