US students make gains in lawsuits over online teaching

From Times Higher Education: “Two years into the pandemic, US students are having some initial success in suing their institutions for abruptly moving courses online, aided by the pre-Covid custom of colleges charging less for virtual formats. The shift from in-person teaching has produced more than 200 lawsuits across the US, most commonly involving students who contend that online alternatives are lower quality and therefore merit lower tuition rates. None of the cases has yet produced a courtroom verdict … But one clear pattern seems to be the idea that institutions are generally given wide latitude on how they choose to teach their students, but are vulnerable if they came to the pandemic with a history of offering online degree programmes and pricing them lower than their in-person provision.”