Welcome fellow codger. Back in my day we had books made from real paper and we loved in. Handing in an assignment meant writing by hand in actual paper and physically handing it to the teacher.

Everything is online. My kids have had very few physical textbooks in years. “Writing a paper” means typing into a n online document. “Handing in” an assignment means dropping some sort of file into an online folder. It’s not really a matter of learning anything, but that school resources are all online and every student needs access.

Also the online services are all “free”. Yeah they might be exploited by advertising but no kid pays and no kid is locked into a commercial vendor (Google at least doesn’t charge)