Many people support the idea of students having the option to learn from home through the internet or video conferencing. At first glance, distance learning may seem like a good idea. Students would be able to learn on their own schedule and would generally have more freedom overall. However, it is not as beneficial as it seems; it would be more difficult for students to learn at home, leading students to lack motivation and causing them to seek outside help to lessen their work loads.

It would be harder for students to learn and work at home than at a physical school. Many students require hands-on activities to learn, and this is not available from the internet or video conferences. Especially in classes such as music or biology, the only way to get a full understanding of a concept is from hands-on learning. Even if students were able to follow along with physical objects, lots of equipment is far too expensive for them to be able to provide for themselves, such as instruments or microscopes. Assuming some students learn from websites or recorded lectures, there are also no real-time explanations for those who would rather learn by listening. This is most helpful in difficult subjects that require a lot of focus and practice to understand, like physics or chemistry. Studies even show that people perform better when working in environments that reflect their activities, and this is, of course, the case when referring to school. Being in a physical classroom would give students the mindset of learning and focusing, and without this, there would be a comparable lack of motivation and willingness to learn.

When not in a school environment, students would be less motivated to actually do anything. Other than parents or guardians, there would be nobody to enforce learning or studying on the students. There would be nothing to stop them from simply turning off the lesson and instead playing a video game or sleeping. Assuming that the students would be able to learn on their own time, many of them would likely take prolonged breaks between lessons, especially if the class is difficult. When students struggle, many of them do not even bother trying at all and possibly may not even pay attention during lectures. It takes a lot to get them back to where they were before once they give up, and this is especially difficult with no physical teacher to encourage them. A lack of teacher and motivation also leaves an opening for students to take advantage of not being monitored, possibly giving them the idea to cheat on their assignments so they would not have to do as much work.

When students do not understand a concept and are no longer willing to put in effort, they tend to find outside resources to help get them by -- in other words, they cheat, and this is humorously simple to do from home. Online classes would not have anyone to monitor students and prevent them from taking other measures, such as family or even just the internet, to get good grades. Many parents work during the day, but there is no guarantee that they would even want to watch over their children if they had the option. School environments restrict students from being able to cheat, so they cannot use their phones to talk to each other while testing. Students learning at home, however, have the unfair advantage of being able to sneakily get by. Though the term "advantage" may be argued since cheating would not help the students in the long run, this only further supports the argument that distance learning does not benefit students as much as people like to think it does.

Distance learning may seem like a good idea at first, but in reality, it holds more disadvantages against students than it does advantages. It would unarguably be more difficult for students to learn on their own at home than from a teacher in school due to a lack of learning styles and in-person assistance. This would cause students to lose interest and motivation to do their work, ultimately leading to them cheating so they can get everything done and out of the way. By not offering distance learning to students, it guarantees that more students will succeed and acquire skills that they can use throughout the rest of their lives.