I obtained an online CS degree fifteen years ago; my kids are doing middle and high school online for the first time last week. Most of my online classes were

I obtained an online CS degree fifteen years ago; my kids are doing middle and high school online for the first time last week. Most of my online classes were before my teens were born. Similar: Its fifteen years later, I'm not exactly the first person to get an online degree, but we still have to pretend all this stuff was invented last week. Different: Fifteen years ago we pretended we could "Work any time we want" although to obtain online discussion points with minimal effort we felt we had to log in at 9am when new discussion topics were posted. Today they don't even pretend you can work when you want and the kids need to be butts in seats logged in, working or not working, for fixed hours, kinda like hourly workers. On the other hand the concept of "write your essay at home in the evening" is gone, kids stop at the end of the online school day. Different: Fifteen years ago we pretended online productivity tools did not exist so the tool experience was shared and there was exactly one vertically integrated system for assignments and discussion. Some schools even tried to roll email into their vertical lockin silo. Today there are official supported tools like google docs/drive and notability and similar, but kids pretty much can use what works for them. Lots of complaining about how its unequal that some kids use the grammar / spelling checker in MS Word and other kids are stuck with google docs spelling checker and plenty of mythology over which is "better" at getting higher grades. Different: Fifteen years ago the only non-vertical silo tools used was MS Office, which made life hard on anyone not on windows with office. MS Doc files and Excel files and Visio and so forth. Now a days its a FOSS and SAS world, I don't think my kids have ever officially used MS Office, LOL. Its all about that free google docs account. Similar: Online discussion is still lame. In person teachers get used to asking the class questions where there's only something useful for maybe the first three kids to comment, for time limit reasons. "Because its easy to track" online class means you get the same dumb questions with three answers, although the entire 20 person class is graded on participating in discussion, so discussions become about 17/20-ths worthless. The first couple kids to participate in online discussion who use up the good topics get some social pressure to shut up next week.