Communicating online is not the same as in person for sure. However, language learning does work well online.
The French Room has set up a dedicated office space at home with all the books, resources, flipcharts, audio etc that we use in our face-to-face classes. So you won’t be missing out in any way on content or teaching methods.
There are some features of online learning that you may come to love. For example, you can save all the comments that are typed into the chat, which means you will have a ready made log of the class. There is also the option to record the whole class if you want to.
So, overall there is a difference in experience including some pretty useful stuff.