The article says that the Ministry has suggested students use other programs, so it sounds like it’s just something students often use rather than something that’s actually required. I’ve not been in school for a long time, but I am doing a distance learning course and when I had to submit some written stuff I definitely found it more comfortable to type it up in an actual word processor than the web platform that only showed about a paragraph at a time, so I did that and then copied it to the web platform.
“During WW1” is the context for this