Your University will Close!

My undergraduate school, the  University of Pittsburgh, will likely not reopen its classrooms for instruction in Fall and is considering modifying dorms and classrooms to achieve safe distances between students and teachers. Online courses are an option, but Pitts Chancellor states , as reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on April 16,  that ”the university does not envision a price reduction for courses delivered on line because Pitt is not an online institution, he said, but rather a university that went online in a national emergency.”

If you were a Pitt undergrad this Fall, would you pay full tuition for poorly designed Internet courses?

With sixteen years experience in every aspect of instructional design for distance learning, I can just imagine what Pitt’s online  courses resemble. There is a difference between classroom instruction and distance learning and what works in classrooms doesn’t work in online instruction.

Here are just a few best practices of distance learning!