In my experience having a well structured program with good content is more important than it being an in person program. This is especially true if there are ways to reach out to live help when a student is struggling with some aspect of the program.
Absolutely. One of the key pillars in the program is student-to-student interaction, either via the Piazza course communication system, or direct contact.
I have extensive knowledge of VMs, so I helped many students get their environments set up. I could often diagnose show-stopping problems for the less-experienced students very quickly, since at my experience level I really have "seen it all". And if it wasn't something I could diagnose that way, I'd set up a Google Hangouts call and watch exactly what was happening on their screen and get them through it.
Many other students did the same thing. In Computability, Complexity, and Algorithms, there were some students who were apparently math robots from the future, solving the problem sets effortlessly, and posting them to Piazza so that the rest of us could use their work for study purposes.
