Faculty Academic Portal · College X · ELUSK Engineering · Environmental · Fall 2026
🗺️ THE OPEN MAP IS LIVEAnyone can pull it up — enrolled or not · Week 6 of 16🐧 NULL Active
EO
Dr. Etadol Obodat
Environmental Engineering · ELUSK · College X · Energy & Watershed Systems
“Every light in the Valley has an address. So does everything it cost to make it. My class is the map where those two facts sit on the same dot — and the door’s open to anybody who wants to look.”
Environmental EngineeringThe TVA FootprintEnergy vs. CostThe Open MapThe class with no walls
56
Sites on the live map
2
Sides — power & cost
∞
Seats (it's public)
1
PhD advisee · Seika
Active Course — meets Mondays, 4:30 PM · but the map never closes
ENVE · Environmental Engineering
Energy & Its Cost: The TVA Footprint
The whole class is one map. On one side, every generator that keeps the Valley’s lights on — nuclear, coal, gas, hydro, pumped storage, solar, wind. On the other, every environmental cost it carries — coal ash, water-discharge permits, spent nuclear fuel. The lesson isn’t “energy is bad” or “we can quit it.” It’s that every fuel brings a bill, and the bill has the same address as the plant. Click a fuel; its cost rings up beneath it. You can’t move it somewhere else. We have to have the power — and we have to do it at least half-right.
Mon 4:30 PM · §4.10.44Both sides → one coordinateELUSK · College X
Toggle the fleet on and watch ~24 GW of nameplate light up across seven fuels. Trace the Valley from Kentucky Dam down to Browns Ferry in Alabama. Every dot is a place someone decided the lights had to stay on.
The bill it leaves
Click Nuclear and ~2,542 metric tons of spent fuel ring up — fuel that never leaves the state. Click Coal and the ash rings up: Kingston is the 2008 spill and its gas replacement. Same coordinate. That asymmetry is the seminar.
Published Work — the method, on the record
Converting Panic Into Discovery: The Tools We Kept After the Classroom Emptied
Obodat, E. · Alakasarian, A. · Journal of Engineering Education Practice · v.12 (2021) · open access · presented at conference, 2021 & 2022
Written the semester every engineering class was sent home and the lab benches went suddenly unreachable. Her argument turns the crisis on its head: the emergency tools were not a downgrade to survive on until things went back to normal — several were an upgrade worth keeping after. When you can’t take a class to a power plant, you build a public map of the plant instead — and the map turned out to teach the environmental cost better than the field trip ever did, because it never closes and anyone can open it. The panic was temporary. The discovery — the open map — stayed. This portal and the Energy Clash map are that argument, built.
One Address, Two Ledgers: Co-locating Generation and Its Externalities as a Teaching Frame
Obodat, E. · Environmental Engineering Pedagogy Review · v.4 (2023)
The formal version of “read the same dot twice.” Argues that students internalize environmental cost faster when the generator and its externality share one coordinate on screen than when they’re taught as separate topics — because you can’t pretend the bill went somewhere else.
The method, in one line
She teaches the way you can’t un-see. Once a student has pulled up the map and stood — on screen — where the power is made and where the bill comes due, they don’t look at a transmission line the same way again. The method isn’t the map. It’s that the map is public, and it never closes. A quiet companion to the one-number discipline they teach two buildings over in The Crossing — same instinct, different corner.
WVIfield-verified · turns a syllabus into a public utility
Signature movethe class you can’t close
Profilewhat the public can see > what the enrolled memorized
🗺️ THE OPEN MAP — Obodat’s methodology-object
Her “notebook” isn’t a notebook. It’s a map anyone can walk up to.
H. Splintons keeps a field notebook. Dr. Obodat keeps a map — and the whole point is that it isn’t hers. It’s public. Enrolled or not, in her class or in another state, you can open the TVA footprint, toggle the power against its cost, flip to satellite and actually see the ash pond or the cooling towers, and stand where the decision was made. That is the paper made real: a class with no walls and no last day. The syllabus is a URL, and the URL stays open.
Where the spent fuel from her three nuclear pins goes to sit — nationwide.
🐧 NULL OBSERVATION · FACULTY FILE — DR. ETADOL OBODAT
Most professors guard the syllabus. Obodat gives hers away — publishes the map, cites every pin, invites the public to find her mistakes. NULL flagged this as a category error until the numbers came in: her students carry the material longer, and strangers who never enrolled use the tool anyway. The paper called it a class with no walls; the campus calls it the open map. NULL Assessment: she didn’t lower the walls of the classroom. She proved the classroom never needed them. The engineering is real, the ash spill is real, the fuel is real — and none of it is behind a login.