BU Today: Why were transfer students not included originally, and why are they being included now?

Carballo: It was because you would have, say, someone who was a junior [when the Hub launched] who’s not doing the Hub, and the transfer junior is doing the Hub, which wouldn’t make sense for parity reasons. Now, all undergrads admitted to BU will be part of the Hub curriculum.
 
The Hub is very inclusive and participatory. Some general education programs in different universities have a very restricted set of courses. The Hub, in contrast, says any faculty member of any rank—tenured, nontenured, lecturer, professor—can submit a course to the Hub and teach to these general education outcomes [if approved by] the General Education Committee.
 
As a result, we have a large inventory that allows a lot of student choice. Soon, we’ll have over 1,300 Hub courses that students can choose from. Before the Hub, there were different general education programs run by different colleges, but no unifying intellectual experience for BU undergrads—other than sharing a two-mile-by-500-foot strip of Comm Ave.

What’s so valuable about the Cross-College Challenge?

Any course could have students from, for example, the College of Communication, the Questrom School of Business, and the College of Arts & Sciences drawing on that knowledge base from their majors, creating this interdisciplinary project. The value is, in this 21st-century job market, where there are careers that will be some of the top professions a decade from now that we don’t even know about, having those skills that are transferable in communication and thinking and teamwork is really important.
 
Since the Hub has been going, about 17 percent of the courses submitted to it were totally new. The program is stimulating faculty to think about teaching differently, and that will engage new ways of learning for students. For the Cross-College Challenge, everything is new. None of those courses existed previously, because it’s a completely novel experience.

How many Hub courses are there now?

We’re a little over 1,200. We’re heading towards 1,300 approved courses on the books in the fall. There’s no reason it can’t continue to grow. The only issue is that we want to be thoughtful in how we assess how things are going.
 
We are looking at big data in terms of enrollment and how much students have completed. We know that the first Hub class, those that entered in fall 2018, on average have completed over half their Hub [units] within the first three semesters of their eight on campus. That’s a good sign. In certain majors, there could be more difficulty in meeting those units, so we want to work with majors to make sure that they have as much [Hub coursework] as is sensible, so they have breadth in coverage. If students are in a job interview three years from now, and they get questions like, “Tell me your creative process,” “How do you work in teams?” ”How do you communicate?” ”How digitally savvy are you?” they can draw on these concrete experiences they’ve developed through coursework.