Stevens Institute Cancels Classes Tuesday To Prep For Coronavirus

HOBOKEN, NJ — The Stevens Institute of Technology, an engineering university on the Hoboken waterfront, has canceled all classes and exams for Tuesday in order to create online versions of their courses to protect students from the spread of novel coronavirus.

After that, their classes and exams will all be online.

They posted an announcement on their website at 4:45 p.m. Monday:

<blockquote>

With the rapidly changing coronavirus (COVID-19) situation, Stevens is cancelling classes tomorrow, Tuesday, March 10 in preparation to bring all courses online through Canvas.

All classes will resume on their normal schedule on Wednesday, March 11 through Friday, March 13, but will be held completely online. However, all lab courses will be postponed. Exams will also be postponed, unless the faculty can offer them online.

During this period, the campus will remain open, but all classes will be held online. There will be no classes or exams held on campus.

We thank you for your fast attention to the change in schedules and look forward to being able to provide continuity in learning throughout the rest of this week.

</blockquote>

The university has made several announcements over the past week about how it will handle the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Earlier on Monday, the school posted an advisory saying they are "moving all classes online as quickly as possible" due to the spread of the illness.

Last Wednesday they had suspended study abroad programs. And on Thursday they announced that they were "suspending gatherings that are discretionary in nature for internal and external groups," which resulted in the cancelation of a major Hoboken fundraiser.

The city of Hoboken had announced its own coronavirus task force on Sunday.

Eleven people were been known to have contracted the virus in New Jersey as of Monday afternoon.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that include the common cold as well as much more serious diseases. The strain that emerged in China in late 2019, now called COVID-19, is related to others that have caused serious outbreaks in recent years, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was on Jan. 21.

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