<p>IMO, FLVS courses are generally of high quality. Apart from the occasional typo/computer glitch, the teachers are all very friendly (they have to be! they go through a few dozen workshops!) and it is not that difficult to be successful. You have to not become distracted and you have to have the motivation. In most of the classes, in order to ensure you understand the material, you should resubmit the assignment until you get a perfect score. This seems to be especially the case in AP Calc.</p>
<p>I’ve also taken Macroeconomics and the text book was VERY boring in my opinion. We used an online Krugman-Wells and it was very long. The course assigned page numbers to read, and then there were several online assessments about the material. I’m sure that all the information that was covered will appear somewhere on the AP Exam, but I’m more interested in understanding the bulk of economics, and not necessarily every single detail. I called my instructor many, many times, and she was always glad and able to help.</p>
<p>For the classroom discussion point: most AP teachers hold online class seminar sessions to go over important material, where students enter a virtual room with a virtual white board and you can type/talk to each other. It is also my opinion that discussions had in a typical classroom environment have served very little purpose to me, as so far most of the schools I have gone to, students really could care less about the material and are more concerned with getting their grade, not with having an intelligent conversation with their pees.</p>
<p>My $.02.</p>