It can be very confusing indeed, especially given that fastai-0.7 files aren’t all in the same place, due to historic reasons I explained above. If you’re following the course-v2 MOOC you better stick to fastai-0.7, since the API has dramatically changed and it’ll be very difficult to make sense of the course-v2 videos using fastai-1.x. And if you do then, yes, you still need to use conda env update exactly as in the past. But you won’t need fastprogress then.
It wasn’t clear from your original post that you were referring to the fastai-0.7 version, but we do know that now. And if you do have installation issues with fastai-0.7 - please post those here.