To the Editor:

Re “Swapping Whiteboards for Screens, in a Week” (front page, March 30):

I was glad to see The Times focus on one group on the front lines who have not received as much recognition as they deserve: teachers, from kindergarten through college. They are working 12-hour days trying to develop lessons so that their students can continue to learn.

Creating an online course, if it is done well, is time-consuming and tedious, and requires a tremendous amount of thinking through an idea or a skill. Instructions that are normally delivered orally must be extremely detailed. Failing to provide a step or a detail can cause students to fail to do something or not understand an idea. For the remainder of the semester, teachers are working on the front lines.

Carolyn Boiarsky

Hammond, Ind.

The writer is a professor of English at Purdue University Northwest-Hammond Campus.

To the Editor:

Though community college students make up nearly half of all undergraduates in the United States today, they are often left out of media coverage, including how the precipitous move to “distance learning” will affect their educations (“Letter Grades Would Fail Students Whom Crisis Sent Home,” news article, March 29).