Why can't I see adobe flash content on my laptop?

Chrome comes with a built-in Flash player. Sometimes this player doesn’t work right. If you have an external Flash player installed (for example, if you installed one via Firefox) Chrome will not necessarily use it automagically, but must instead be configured to use it. You may already have done this.
Internet Explorer is just awful junk and should not be used. I don’t know how it works enough to try to diagnose it for you. I doubt anyone who does not work at Microsoft knows enough about its internal workings to properly diagnose it. If you look / ask around on Technet, though, you might find some useful information.
It could be that you have the latest version of Flash installed, but that the particular content you are trying to view requires an older version. Sometimes Flash updates are not perfectly backward-compatible. It’s not easy to verify this, but if you can get a look at the Actionscript of the Flash content there may be some information there about the version of Flash (or whatever authoring tool) produced the content.
You could ask the authors of the relevant website to look into it. If you are paying for the class, it is incumbent on them to make sure their stupid website works (IMO in 2013, any website that depends on Flash is stupid by definition.)

Spinning off of the previous comment, try installing Firefox. Be sure the Adobe Flash plug-in is installed and enabled, and see if that works

So I tried uninstalling flash and reinstalling but it still says it’s already installed. I’m not sure how thats possible since I just uninstalled it? I also tried firefox and the same message comes up when trying to view adobe flash.

Hard to diagnose without actually sitting at your computer, but I suspect the problem is simple, or at least solvable. There’s a variety of tips here.

If you have re-installed Flash, then of course it is already installed. If you have only attempted to reinstall Flash and got that message, then Chrome is using its internal Flash plugin (and IE may be doing the same. I don’t know. Don’t use IE. It only complicates things.)

The Windows version of Firefox may have Flash bundled with it. I don’t know, as I’ve not used it in 3 years.

“I have also gone through the process of checking to see if it’s enabled. It is.”
Please enumerate the exact steps you used to verify this. There’s more than one way, and knowing which way you used could be helpful for diagnosis.

The fact that the problem recurs across 3 different browsers suggests that it’s not a browser problem but a plugin problem. Pick one browser for testing. I recommend Firefox since it’s the one I personally know best (I have Chromium and Firefox running constantly on this computer, but FF is the one I hack on.) Once you get it working in the one you pick, you can test it again on the others; before then browser-hopping will just confuse the issue.

Thank you everyone for the advice. I did a lot of tinkering around with it and finally got it to work. What a relief!