Hello again, OLLI members:

Amidst the overall quiet created by social distancing and “Safer at Home” regulations, you may not notice the activity taking place within OLLI-USF to bring you courses that you want and need within just a few weeks.

  1. We are actively scheduling classes now for the Summer term, involving many of OLLI’s finest instructors and the variety of topics you've come to expect from us. We expect to have our Summer schedule available online later this month, and we’ll introduce it to you at the (virtual) Annual Meeting/OpenHouse on May 6.
  2. OLLI “work groups” – informal collaborations of members with expertise in a particular area – have been meeting nearly every day this week to discuss class delivery platforms, training for instructors who are new to “distance learning,” and re-framing OLLI’s Strategic Plan to address the realities of the Coronavirus era.
  3. Several OLLI instructors have practiced holding classes using easily available on-line meeting software, and frankly, I’m amazed at how quickly our members have adapted to the new technology and learned how to “tame” it for our purposes. We plan to offer training sessions throughout the summer to help you become comfortable with the new technology; our experience has been that there are a few minutes of chaos at the very beginning, but within a very few minutes, users have become comfortable with the basic capabilities and the exchange of ideas begins. I've been amazed at how well "OLLI life" has transferred to the online world!
  4. The new technologies seem easily adaptable to groups of varying sizes. We’ve noticed instructors conducting on-line classes without difficulty this week for as many as 55 participants!
  5. We appreciate your continued support! As mentioned in an earlier communication, OLLI-USF has a financial reserve created for just this type of program interruption (although we were probably thinking more of hurricanes than pandemics at the time). The staff, the Board of Advisors, and dedicated OLLI volunteers are making daily progress in developing a lifelong learning program to cope with the new realities, and we’ll be sharing more information with you as we continue to do so.


Phyllis