I was a homeschooling parent and was, briefly, on the board of directors and the lead mod for an educational organization because of it.

Most people overestimate how much work they need to put into homeschooling. They think they need to teach their kids like eight hours a day because that's how long they are in school usually and they feel overwhelmed.

This is not true.

One article I read years ago indicated that after standing in line, changing classes, doing lunch, having roll call, etc was accounted for, students in public school spent between one and three hours a day on actual learning.

Similarly, under California law (back in the day), one legal option for homeschooling was to hire a tutor for three hours a day. Not eight. Just three.

Public school teachers typically deal with classes of twenty or more students. Homeschooling parents have a much better student-teacher ratio and the one-on-one teaching is much more intensive than public school education.

You and your children will both experience rapid burnout if you try to spend eight hours a day actively teaching them. You don't need to and you really shouldn't. It's an unsustainable pace.

You can check Learn in Freedom for ideas etc, authored by tokenadult https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tokenadult (he's a teacher by profession, but homeschooled his own kids):

https://learninfreedom.org/

Then, a lot of performing arts folks I know are trying to find work, and one of the suggestions is remote nanny'ing (aka, entertaining your kids over video),

I think there's an opportunity to self-organize people to address these things. Out among all of us us, there's enough expertise, desire and shared need.

So far, very few parents have actually tried it. I saw one pair of toddlers in the session I popped into briefly this afternoon, but I haven't used it for my own toddler, and it's mostly been childless folks talking with each other.

My son's music teacher from daycare has also started offering entertainment via videochat (along with his two kids), and my son's enjoyed it, but he's still fully supervised and it hasn't taken any load off my wife and me.

As a parent, I see two big problems with it:

1.) Scheduling. Logistically, being a parent and working from home is already really challenging, and it's pretty unlikely that the times your single friends or educators are free lines up with the needs of your kid or work schedule. (Inverting the scheduling so that parents propose the time may help with that, but parents are generally too busy to propose times and check for a response these days.)

2.) Trust. Pre-schoolers (the age range with the biggest time crunch) cannot generally be trusted to be alone with a computer. I've tried using PBSKids as a babysitter, and my kid nearly broke my touch screen, tossed the laptop off the couch twice, almost deleted my code (thank god for undo and version control), and asks for the channel to be changed every 10-15 minutes because that's his attention span.

Being completely raised by the book as Nell is wasn't what the book was intended for either by it's creator, Hackworth, or the patron, Finkle-McGraw. It was instead intended as a supplement for the failings of traditional education.

For small kids all of the online options are only supplements to the interactions and learning that happens offline. The digital interfaces are still to clunky for them to learn much from anything but meatspace interactions with people and their environment.

That being said I appreciate Siri answering why questions 100+ times a day.

As a parent it would need to be FOSS though.

While this virus does survive in aerosol form, it is not strictly airborne; This means that a non HEPA filter will likely stop it and that, from the return side; it's more likely to settle on the carpet or furniture than particularly infecting a human.

The more likely issue would be meetings of more than 1 person in a poorly ventilated room with no airflow; where aerosol virus would linger.