Trump has a new plan to make foreign students’ lives difficult: bar them from the US if their schools are classes online.

Distance learning, as such, is not wrong. (Whether it is as good for learning as being in a university and going to classes physically is an open question, outside my expertise.) However, they are almost surely doing it with nonfree software, and that is an injustice.

I expect Trump is doing this simply as another way to express hostility to foreigners, and is not interested in what the universities do. But if this does help convince some universities to stop making students use nonfree software, that will be a positive side effect.