XCC Adjusts to Online Course Delivery

March 30, 2020
By Devyani Chhetri

While some were on their way home and logging in from the airport, some were trying to match the time difference from their rooms oceans away.

As the clock neared 12:30pm on a routine Tuesday afternoon, the usual setup of tables and chairs in BU’s Howard Thurman Center were now replaced with bite sized windows on Zoom.

The Cross College Challenge was now temporarily online.

Much like their peers across university lines, XCC students at BU have had to rethink their schedules, their welfare and the way they wanted to move forward with their classes and required projects.

In the “High Stakes: Social Equity in the Cannabis Industry” class taught by Prof. Ian Mashiter and Dr. Seth Blumenthal, Tuesday afternoon started with individual check-ins with every student.

The professors asked every student where they were attending class from and how they were keeping up.

“It’s a tough transition,” Blumenthal said to his students who have spent weeks researching the growth of Massachusetts’ nascent cannabis industry after cannabis was first legalized in 2016.

Split into groups, the class has identified potential gaps in the industry’s regulation and are developing mechanisms that could make the industry more equitable.

Whether it be an online game to help entrepreneurs figure out the pathways of licensing, processing and setting up shop in the state, or social media campaigns for advocacy groups, the class has been trying to find ways to help an industry struggling to provide benefits and equitable access to businesses run by people of color.

But with XCC going online in the current circumstances, students wondered if the current pandemic was going to impact the communication with their partners.

To this, Blumenthal said that it was time to ‘recalibrate’ and employ flexibility. Setting the theme of the upcoming weeks, teams spent their class time working on project outlines and presentations to identify elements that were unrealistic.

Meanwhile in the “Makings of a Great Baseball Player” class taught twice a week by Prof. Andy Andres and Prof. Kathryn Webster, the virtual atmosphere was optimistic.

Students spent time working in teams on research topics that investigated the impact of statistics and technology in modern day baseball.

“We thankfully did a lot of content based work before spring break. We formed project groups, got students thinking about questions,” Prof. Andy Andres said about the game plan for the rest of the semester.

“The last half of the semester is going to be about refining these questions and present it well.”

Andres was confident that the class was going to get through. The class had already kickstarted a journey via Zoom when they spoke to Ben Lindbergh, author of The MVP Machine.

“Obviously the sharing of content on Zoom is inferior to sharing the content in class,” he added. “There is more interaction in class. But that’s a small compromise that we’ve had to make.”

This article was written by Devyani Chhetri, a graduate assistant with XCC.