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.