Say “online school” to most Australian parents and I suspect you’ll get a small, involuntary shudder. For a lot of us, the phrase is welded to 2020: frozen screens, a teacher saying “you’re on mute” into the void and a grid of black squares pretending to pay attention.
I remember trying to run a team meeting in the second month of lockdown while my youngest son sat behind me. He’d decided to attend his Grade 3 maths class lying on the floor under a heavy doona. Every few minutes the video would freeze because someone in the kitchen had started the microwave, which knocked the Wi-Fi out. So I’d stop mid-sentence, stare at my own frozen face and wait for the connection to come back, while his teacher’s voice drifted up muffled through the blankets. Peak professionalism.
Here’s the thing, though. Lockdown learning was an emergency. Schools grabbed whatever tools they already had and made it up as they went. Purpose-built online schools claim to be a different beast. I wasn’t entirely convinced, so I went digging. How does a live online class actually work, and what separates a good one from a lockdown-era video call?
Synchronous vs asynchronous learning
Every online school will throw these two words at you, so it helps to know what they mean.
Synchronous learning happens in real time. Teacher and students log in together, talk, ask questions and work through things as a group. That’s the “live class” bit.
Asynchronous learning is self-paced. Recorded videos, readings, interactive activities and quizzes you work through whenever suits you.
Neither works brilliantly on its own. A fully self-paced course sounds great until you realise nobody is checking whether you’ve done anything (ask me how my online Spanish course is going). A fully live timetable is the opposite problem. Six hours a day on video calls is exhausting (there’s Stanford research on Zoom fatigue if you need convincing), and I doubt anyone learns much in hour five. The better online schools blend the two, using live time for the stuff that needs a teacher in the room and self-paced time for everything else.
The tech stack behind a virtual classroom
Broadly speaking, online schools run on three layers of software. Each layer has its job, and I reckon understanding them takes a lot of the mystery out of the whole thing.
The video platform
This is the live classroom itself, usually Microsoft Teams, Zoom or Google Meet. The useful features go well beyond video: screen sharing, digital whiteboards, breakout rooms for small group work, chat, hand raising and recording.
The learning management system
The learning management system (LMS) is where the courses live. Platforms like Canvas, Moodle and Google Classroom hold lesson content, host assignments, collect submissions and track progress. If the video platform is the classroom, the LMS is the rest of the school building. Probably including the lost property box.
The digital notebook
This is where students do the heavy lifting. Tools like OneNote let students write, draw with a stylus, record audio and embed video. Teachers can peek at a student’s working as it happens, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending on how neat your working is.
Haileybury Pangea, which opened in 2023 as Victoria’s first private online school, offers online schooling for Years 5 to 12 and is a good example of how the layers fit together. Classes run on Microsoft Teams with the school’s own teachers, while Canvas and OneNote handle the self-paced material, weekly progress tracking and each student’s digital notebook.
What makes a live online lesson feel live
Getting the software right is the easy part. What makes an online class feel like a real classroom comes down to the human side of things.
Class size is the big one. In a video call with 30 students, most of them become a passive thumbnail. I’d almost certainly be one of them, camera angled at the ceiling fan. In a small group, everyone can be on camera, the teacher can read the room and nobody gets to quietly vanish. I think small classes matter even more online than in a physical classroom.
Interaction has to be designed in, too. Good online teachers build in constant touchpoints: quick polls, students scribbling on a shared screen, breakout rooms for pair work and the occasional (friendly) cold call.
Expectations make a difference as well. At Haileybury Pangea every class is live and attendance is compulsory, with parents expected to let the school know about absences. Which is exactly how a normal school works, so no loopholes there.
And the teachers need to know the medium. Teaching through a screen is its own skill. Pacing, checking whether anyone understood and running a discussion all work differently when you can’t see the back row rolling their eyes.
Internet speed, latency and regional connections
This is where it gets practical, especially for regional families and anyone travelling.
In my experience, bandwidth is rarely the real villain. According to Microsoft’s own figures, Teams can deliver HD video on less than 1.5 Mbps, which is a fraction of a typical NBN plan. The trouble usually starts when everyone in the house wants a slice of the connection at once: someone streaming 4K in the lounge room, a game update downloading in the background. A wired ethernet connection or a mesh Wi-Fi setup that gets a strong signal to the study space will fix most dropouts.
My family is living proof. The kids have an uncanny knack for kicking off a massive game update the moment I join a work call, and we have a guest bedroom where the Wi-Fi simply goes to die. I’ve stopped fighting it and just don’t take calls in there.
Latency, the delay between talking and being heard, matters more than raw speed for a live conversation. It’s what makes a call feel clunky, with everyone talking over each other and then apologising at the same time. Older satellite services are where this really bites. When the ACCC first measured satellite broadband in late 2024, Starlink averaged 29.8 milliseconds of latency while NBN Sky Muster averaged 664.9 milliseconds. That gap comes down to distance, since Sky Muster’s satellites sit in a much higher orbit than Starlink’s. If you’re relying on Sky Muster or patchy mobile coverage, a backup like a mobile hotspot is a smart move.
Recordings are the safety net. Even the best connection has bad days, and schools that record lessons or back them up with self-paced material mean a dropout doesn’t equal a missed lesson.
What a week at an online school looks like
So how does this come together? At Haileybury Pangea, students get two to three live lessons per subject each week in small, interactive classes, plus four to six hours of self-paced work per subject and one-on-one time with teachers when they need it. That last bit is handy for kids who have to skip the odd live lesson for a competition or training camp.
It’s a structure built for students who can’t follow a standard timetable, whether that’s because of elite sport, living remotely or travelling with family. If that sounds like your household and you’re in Victoria or the Northern Territory, Haileybury Pangea is probably worth a look. You can also watch recordings of real lessons, including a roughly ten-minute Year 7 Humanities class and a library of others, VCE included. I found watching one tells you more than any brochure could.
Questions to ask an online school
If you’re comparing options, these questions should sort the well-built programs from the ones held together with sticky tape:
- How many live lessons are there per subject each week, and how big are the classes?
- Which platforms do students use, and will they run on the devices we already own?
- Are lessons recorded or backed up with self-paced material if a student misses one?
- What happens if our internet drops out mid-lesson?
- How is progress tracked, and how often will we hear about it?
- How can students reach their teachers outside class time?
So, does online school actually work?
I went into this half expecting to find lockdown learning with a nicer logo. I don’t think that’s what it is anymore. The tech is solid now, but honestly the software was never the hard part. The schools doing it well have small classes, teachers who know how to teach through a screen and a sensible balance of live and self-paced learning. Get those right and a virtual classroom can feel surprisingly close to the real thing. Just maybe keep the microwave away from the router.
