ABSTRACT

The spread of the coronavirus (COVID-19) is placing impossible demands on distance education. With the closure of schools and colleges, teachers are being given only weeks to put their courses online regardless of their lack of online experience and support facilities. In the United States of America, international students who fail to continue their studies online have been threatened with expulsion to their own countries, where online resources may be unavailable. The failure of institutions to place their curricula online efficiently will be a public relations disaster blamed not on those who have issued these impossible demands but on the false premise that distance education methods were ineffective all along. The article summarizes the problems facing teachers and students in this situation, and repeats a conclusion expressed by me in previous reflection articles: that the surest way to make online learning effective is to consult the decades of practical experience in the distance education literature.

摘要

冠状病毒（COVID-19）的传播对远程教育提出了不可能的要求。随着学校和大学的关闭，无论缺乏在线经验和支持设施如何，都只给教师几周的时间使其课程在线。在美利坚合众国，未能继续在线学习的国际学生面临被驱逐到其本国的威胁，而本国可能没有在线资源。机构未能将其课程有效地在线放置，将是一场公共关系灾难，不是因为那些提出了这些不可能的要求的人，而是因为错误的前提是远程教育方法一直无效。本文总结了这种情况下师生面临的问题，