Avram,
I heard this talk myself firsthand online, I am ashamed to say.
>> Do you think the Zoom classes held by schools were an adequate substitute for their in-person classes? I think education was devastated last year.
Many zoom classes were not good. Same as, to go with GH examples, a donkey driver had hard time feeding barley to his first car. You need to know what you are doing. Especially when both teachers and students are not bakiim and there is no computer support, the result will be sub-optimal.
Real online schools do not have all classes on zoom. They have some classes live through systems that do not distract when students log in (or not), and then they have online curriculum and list of materials you can access and tests, many with automatic grading. Types of classes and tests are structured into several types and kids learn to navigate and know what to expect – which tests just check what you remember from the class, others have harder problems and larger part of the grade.