Some schools have begun to allow students to learn from home using videos and online conferencing. While this may seem like a good way to get more students to attend school more frequently, it will actually have the opposite effect in the long run. Students will not benefit from this new form of classes because they will be encouraged to miss school more often, be easily distracted, and the classes will not be as effective.

With the ability to take classes outside of school, there will be less incentive for students to attend school. This will not only hurt them in their academics but also in their social lives. Student attending classes at home will not attend school events or interact with their peers as much as students who attend school in a more traditional manner. Many students only interact with their friends in school; so if they are not attending school they will not interact with their friends. The lower attendance will also hurt the school because less students will attend school spirit events or fundraisers. The availability of online classes could also hurt the students attending regular school because of the diminishing school community. Not to mention that students taking classes at home will not receive the same quality of education as those taking classes in school.

Online classes are not as engaging for students, who can be easily distracted. Watching videos online is not very interesting, especially if they are school related. Very few students find learning fun and interesting. The majority of students who do not will not find watching school videos very enthralling. Without a teacher present students will be easily lose focus and not pay attention to the instructional videos. One of the classes I am currently taking is doing a 'flipped classroom' structure; meaning we watch videos of lessons at home and do practice similar to homework in school. While watching these lesson videos I often find myself distracted and having to rewind parts of the video. It is easy to imagine a less dedicated student simply missing parts of the videos and not bothering to rewind. This tendency has strong potential to hurt students who are easily distracted or not strongly invested in their learning.

Learning from a video is not as interactive as doing the same in a classroom with a teacher present. Many students learn in different ways; a fact that would be hard for a teacher to accommodate for over a video conference. The video conferencing would also make it difficult for teachers to interact directly with their students by offering feedback for their work and answering questions. Activities done in the classroom in which students interact with the material that they are learning are integral for students to effectively learn said material. In the summer after eighth grade, I took Geometry online from home. The class consisted of videos and small projects followed by online quizzes. Despite getting a very good grade in the class, I retained almost none of the information I learned. To this day, I often struggle in my math classes when we learn information that builds on what we were supposed to learn in Geometry. The online class lacked the flair that a real teacher would have added to the class that was necessary for me learning the information in a meaningful way. Students taking online classes would face very similar challenges to the ones I did, greatly diminishing the meaningfulness of the classes.

The concept of online classes seems great on the surface but comes with unforeseen issues that can dramatically affect students' quality of education. The fallibility of students' dedication to learning is often something that is not taken into account, even though it is something that is easily predictable. Student will always try to get out of going to school, want to do anything but watch a long, monotonous video, and need teachers to make learning interesting. For these reasons, online classes will never be as effective as traditional, in-class learning.