By Amber Roos
— This Wednesday, 11th of March 2020, the first lecture at AUC was cancelled due to COVID-19-related incidents. Students taking International Social Cognition received an email informing them that their lecture was cancelled because their Professor needed to stay home with her son after COVID-19 was detected at his school.
Although the lecture was cancelled, measures were taken by the Professor to ensure that the class could still continue in some form. Students had to complete multiple assignments themselves, since these assignments would otherwise have been done in class. Some students had a presentation due that day, but will now be graded only on their slides. “We still worked with our groups for two hours even though there was no class.” said Laila Spee, a third-year Social Science major.
AUC is following guidelines of the UvA and has not cancelled any courses. “It was our teacher’s own decision, and I understand her reasoning.” says Sarah Tjeerdsma, another third-year Social Science major. Next week, this course is scheduled to continue as usual and most students are not very worried about the missed class.
Today, a Clinical Neuroscience lecture was cancelled under similar circumstances. A guest lecture was scheduled with an employee of the Amsterdam University Medical Center (UMC). This morning, new regulations for Amsterdam UMC employees were released which meant Amsterdam UMC employers are no longer allowed to make work-related travels nationally (international work-related travel was already prohibited).
“We have not yet received any information on how to catch up with the class content [that] we now miss out on,” says Tjeerdsma who is also taking another course with a cancelled class. Despite some lectures being cancelled, students expect their lecturers to respond to the cancellations soon and update them on solutions.
The Herring 