Story aside, I'm most concerned with how closing a laptop "deleted" the lesson plan! It's hard to imagine how that could occur, and I've worked with a lot of people who aren't very technical.

Most likely a SaaS app that auto-saves, but didn’t save properly. Then closing the laptop caused a network disconnect, and the in-browser app did not recover gracefully while awaiting reconnect on wake-up and lost all unsaved data.

This would have been unbelievable to me before this year. Then I used PowerPoint via the browser and found this level of data loss is a regular occurrence.

Edu saas is some of the worst crap I've ever had to deal with. It's one of those unfortunate cases of procurement not involving anyone who actually has to use it.

I could absolutely see a combo of a super short session timeout when the browser tab isn't active anymore combined with not actually saving drafts anywhere except in that session that gets deleted with prejudice.

I just spent an hour this morning talking with a friend who had an important saved draft email disappear after closing her laptop. Software is shit these days.

I've had cases where I'm writing some long text in certain apps on my phone, screen goes off, and when I turn it back on that text is gone. Could be something similar, though I can't imagine any desktop app being that crappy.