1. A lot of their work is marking up drawings which traditionally have been printed on massive sheets of paper. Online, it's hard to click, zoom, markup, zoom out, etc. Not impossible, but much harder.
2. These files can be GBs in size. Imagine waiting 45 minutes for a file to download, you add two comments, and then it takes another hour to upload back to the server where another engineer repeats the process.
3. Many of their employees live in remote areas where bandwidth measured in kbps, not mbps.
4. Some employees don't have full-sized monitors or even laptops at home. Some only have tablets.
5. Hardly any of the employees have ever used Zoom, so that alone is a huge learning curve for them to download/install/get a webcam setup/etc.
6. The VPN they had was not configured to handle the amount of bandwidth now being pushed through it. Their provider had to send technicians out to the office multiple times.
Most classes are transitioning to an online format, using Zoom, Blackboard collaborate, or other videoconferencing software. Professors will also likely be using this software to meet with individual students one-on-one.
Research seminars too. For example, here is an online conference being conducted over Zoom:
https://www.daniellitt.com/agonize/
Here is an example of a weekly seminar that moved online:
http://www-math.mit.edu/~dav/LG/
This replaces the spate of in-person seminars and conferences which have all been cancelled.