A Brief History of DOFPro CTP

Author

DOFPro group

Origins

DOFPro CTP grew out of forty years of teaching chemical and thermal engineering—and a pandemic.

My teaching career began at MIT in Course 3 (Materials Science and Engineering), and since 1988 I have taught at Harvey Mudd College. At Harvey Mudd I first taught Engineering 94: Chemical Engineering Principles in Spring 1989. Over the years I taught E94 and its sequel, Engineering 82: Chemical and Thermal Principles, fourteen times.

The course evolved considerably over those years. It began as a team-taught lecture course with colleagues Tony Bright, Mary Cardenas, Rich Phillips, and Don Remer. Later it became a seminar-style, student-led discussion course, and eventually it evolved into a flipped classroom format using online videos combined with student-led discussions.

In Fall 2020, COVID forced the course fully online, with students scattered around the world. During the preceding summer I created more than ninety videos and structured the course around discussions and office hours scheduled across multiple time zones.

The visuals for the videos were created in PowerPoint and Keynote and were based on three decades of lecture notes. The material drew heavily on several excellent textbooks, including:

  • Felder and Rousseau (with Bullard)
  • Smith and Van Ness (with Abbott & Swihart)
  • Çengel and Boles (with Kanoğlu)

These books remain outstanding resources, but they are all copyrighted.

The course also included spreadsheet and software assignments using Microsoft Excel, MATLAB, and PRO/II, all of which are commercial tools.

The Project

As I approached the end of my career, two things became increasingly clear.

First, many students were reluctant to purchase expensive textbooks or software licenses. Second, during a trip to Ahmedabad University with a group of students for a joint engineering project, I was reminded that the cost of educational resources can be prohibitive in many parts of the world.

I realized that my existing videos and websites were tied to tools and materials that were simply too expensive for much of the world.

I decided that my final sabbatical project would be to convert the course materials into a fully open resource:

  • The videos and written material would be released under a Creative Commons license.
  • Spreadsheet and software projects would use open-source tools.

After extensive research, I chose the following tools and platforms:

  • GitHub for hosting the web materials
  • LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Office
  • DWSIM instead of PRO/II
  • Python and R instead of MATLAB

Josh Brake kindly introduced me to Quarto, which became the foundation for the website. This also meant that the original visuals had to be converted from PowerPoint and Keynote into Quarto RevealJS presentations.

Although the original videos had taken only a summer and part of a semester to create, the scale of converting everything to open tools was much larger. I estimated it would take two years and a summer—and that I would need help.

The Birth of DOFPro

I recruited student researchers to work on the project in several areas:

  • script editing
  • website development
  • software conversion
  • video recording and editing
  • on-screen presentation

From my experience with student-led courses, I believed that students would respond more readily to fellow students on screen rather than to an older, bald, overweight professor. I did appear on screen occasionally, but I managed to stay out of most of the videos.

Work on the project began the year before my sabbatical. In the end, the project took two and a half years to complete, and several aspects had to be scaled back because of limits on time, energy, and available expertise.

Over the course of the project:

  • twenty students from several Claremont campuses (and one high school) worked on the project
  • students reviewed scripts, suggested edits, and checked for copyrighted or commercial material in the existing videos
  • multiple students experimented with appearing as on-screen presenters

After considerable debate over the name and logo, we chose The Degrees of Freedom Project (DOFPro).

The name reflects three ideas:

  • the degrees of freedom used in solving chemical engineering problems
  • the freedom provided by Creative Commons and open-source tools
  • the degrees of freedom required to describe the trajectory of a rocket

The logo reflects these two major themes of the project:
a benzene ring for the chemical-process side (CTP) and a rocket for the aerospace side (RCK).

Many students tried appearing as on-screen presenters, but three students proved particularly effective and recorded the majority of the videos.

One unexpected outcome was that no students volunteered to convert the MATLAB projects to Python or R, so I performed those conversions myself. The Python work appears mostly in animations rather than in dedicated “how-to” videos.

This surprised me somewhat, since all Harvey Mudd students learn Python in the required computer science course.

A Major Setback

In May 2024 I suffered a serious exercise injury that required surgery. I spent most of the summer recovering in a recliner and communicating with my two summer students through daily Zoom meetings.

I still perform physical therapy exercises three days a week.

That interruption likely explains why the project ultimately took an extra summer and roughly half a year beyond my original estimate.

The videos were recorded in the Digital Production Studio in the Harvey Mudd Makerspace. We used a whiteboard setup with green screen fabric attached to one side (opinions differ as to whether this should be called green screen, green-screen, or greenscreen).

The JTF (Just the Facts) and TFS (The Full Story) formats were inspired by:

  • a Veritasium video describing how students learn better when they must reconcile conflicting explanations rather than receiving a single polished presentation
  • research by my son suggesting that students strongly prefer watching equations written on a board rather than presented as polished LaTeX slides

The original plan was to produce both JTF and TFS versions of most conceptual videos. However, organizing spontaneous interviews and scheduling participants proved extremely difficult. In the end we produced only eight TFS videos.

Veritasium eventually abandoned that format as well, so I suspect they encountered the same logistical problem.

Future Videos

I no longer have easy access to students, and the green-screen fabric has been removed from the whiteboard in the studio, so future videos will likely require a different recording approach.

Scripts already exist for replacement videos corresponding to the This is NOT a DOFPro video entries currently included in the site. We simply ran out of time to record them.

Since I originally wrote and recorded the statistics videos myself, I feel reasonably comfortable including them temporarily until their replacements are recorded.

Additional material also exists:

  • the advanced Phase Equilibria videos from Engineering 134 (not yet rewritten)
  • Engineering 133: Chemical Reaction Engineering course notes
  • a large collection of homework problems and solutions

I hope to convert these into videos and open materials over time.

However, I am now officially emeritus, and putting in eight-to-ten hour days on DOFPro is becoming less appealing than it once was.

Still, I hope that what we have been able to produce proves useful.

If you have comments, corrections, or suggestions, please send email to:

comments@dofpro.org

For managerial-level comments, please write to:

management@dofpro.org