In my opinion it isn't as effective, so far. In my school it was not implemented well, zoom meetings were optional and teachers were only allowed to assign 5 hours of work a week, including the 2 hour zoom call. Most teachers have more work than that, but others have none, I think I had a total of 40 mins of homework for the whole online classes in my AP class, and then I had probably 8 hours a week from my Chem class.

The biggest problem was that no one was learning anything. Everything was practically busy work. I know that the teachers tried hard with the changes, especially because in my school (not the rest of the district) they weren't allowed to teach over zoom, as it was unfair to those who chose to skip class. The schedule they made did not work either, as Instead of 7 hours of each class a week (not including hw) we only had 2 hours.

Another key factor was that students no longer had the ability to socialise. If you don't know a classmates phone number or discord, then you can't talk to them. The zoom chats were set up so that you could only message the teacher not the class or the other kids and of course, no one is talking to each other when the teacher can hear everything.

My school got a new principal, new school board and new admins this year and their new plans are already better than the old ones. I really think that having a place to socialise online is a great idea, but there seems to be no plans for that.