Traditional schooling has always consisted of face to face learning with a teacher, tutor, or parent (if the individual is home schooled). However, as it becomes harder for students to travel and fit into schools with limited capacities, it is becoming near impossible to satisfy the educational needs of all children in the U.S. This is where video conference based learning comes in hand. While this system does eliminate the geographical issues within public education, it brings up more concerning issues like how these "at home" students would take tests, how focused they would be, and how they would attend extra curricular activities.

Online learning can make it more practical for a student to connect with teachers without the hassle of driving someplace or losing school days due to weather. Currently, the winter seasons are difficult for teachers in Virginia due to unpredictable snow and ice days taking away school for the day. Even though these teachers are still able to assign homework to some degree, it becomes much harder for them to actually teach their students and stay on track with their material. While there can still be issues with electronic teaching during huge weather storms which take out the power supply to neighborhoods, it still reduces the impact of severe weather by keeping students off the roads and the teaching staff safe at home. Even if the teachers don't have their materials to teach labs or demonstrations located at their house, they can at least contact the students and hopefully work on a review day for a big test coming up or give the students notes from a couple classes ahead in the schedule so that they don't miss out on valuable class time. Additionally, eliminating the steps between waking up and getting to school makes it much less likely that students will come late to school. In fact, it can even save them some sleep by allowing them to simply wake up and go to school right in their living room. This not only helps students stay more awake, but can also insure that students are not tardy due to heavy traffic, a late bus, or simply forgetting something at home. Therefore, it is very useful to have online teaching in the sense that weather has a smaller chance of affecting teachers schedules and can limit the hassle of driving from one's home to their school.

On the contrary, online education is very hard to monitor seeing as students are able to hide their actions better and have a higher probability of getting away with cheating. While plagiarism is still hard to pull off with modern day tools such as Turnitin. com and other work checking sources, it is likely that some students will easily be able to copy their friends work and turn it in, making only minor changes to trick the teacher. In fact, the limited view of the computer monitor would make it almost enticing for a student to hide the answer key behind the computer and glance at it every couple of seconds or simply hang it above the computer. While this issue can be fixed by issuing students computers with a 360 degree field of vision, this would border on intruding into the student's personal life and raise other issues. Even though students cannot look at other students papers over their shoulder while they test, this is only one issue of cheating fixed which consequently leads to dozens of others being created. Thus, online education will only make it easier for students to cheat on assessments.

Similarly, having online education address a student in their home or place of comfort only increases the amount of distractions present to them. For example, a student could easily stop paying attention to focus on other classes, toys, games, TV, food, friends, family, and more. It is even feasible that the students will get distracted looking out the window of their house if whatever is in their yard is more intriguing than that which is being taught to them. This is the primary reason why online education will never work. Even if the student tries their best to isolate themselves in a room void of all distractions, it is incredibly easy to fall asleep since the student does not have to fear the teachers scolding and repercussions in real life. Similar to how cyber bullying is easier to start than real life bullying, it is easier to hide behind a screen and hear your teacher yell at you for falling asleep compared to having to put up with it in real life. Finally, staring at a screen for a long period of time is never healthy for students. It not only deforms their spine (if improper stature is used) but can destroy their eyesight slowly. Conversely, if a student were to meet with a teacher in real life and have to pay attention to them all day instead of a computer screen, they would not only be more engaged but also not get headaches and eye pain from staring at the obnoxious glow of a computer screen all day.

Finally, bring school back home and never leaving the house makes it much harder to participate in extra curricular activities. Since most activities students participate in are heavily tied with public schools, it would become harder to make it to sports practices, clubs, honor society meetings, and more. Without these extra curriculars, students have a higher chance of becoming bored, indignant, and inactive in society. This also makes it harder to connect with students online seeing as many students know certain teachers through coaching a sports team or supporting a club. Without these connections, teachers simply become another face on the screen telling the students what to do. Therefore, online education is not only a bad idea due to distractions, but also limits students' ability to be active and engaged in class.

In conclusion, online education can offer certain benefits and eliminate small issues in the education system. However, it would be more detrimental to students by allowing them to cheat, quickly become distracted, and miss out on extra curricular activities.