text: Although students may groan and complain about schooling, it is abundantly clear that students absorb the majority of information and techniques they are taught in school; however, the same cannot be said for online schooling. When students attend school, the staff has policies and measures put in place to observe if students are learning or are in need of help. If a teacher finds that a student is struggling, the teacher can meet with that student and confirm that they understand the material. With online schooling, however, the monitoring of students is made extremely difficult without direct face-to-face contact. Some students are too shy or too stubborn to ask for help; with online teachers relying on weekly video conferences and students emailing them with their concerns, an entire group of students are isolated and continues to struggle. Some may argue that online courses should be able to record student progress through test scores and quiz grades, but without a teacher to watch for cheating, many students use the internet to look up answers and falsely increase their scores. Without the ability to directly observe students, online courses turn to creating more assignments for students to complete in hopes of catching where the student is lacking. This leads to an abundance of busywork that may sometimes hardly pertain to the subject being taught and costs hours of the students time. Many students sign up for online learning to have a flexible schedule but are faced with the harsh reality that the coursework within online courses takes much more time to complete than the work within a class taken at a school. This causes many students to adjust their mindset from learning information to getting the workload down and done as fast as possible as the expense of retaining the material taught. Suppose a mother decided to pursue an online education in order to earn a degree while taking care of her child. The projects and assignments that are piled onto the mother has potential to distract her from her child. Prioritizing the baby, the mom begins working on the material with the goal in mind not to learn but to finish the work so that she is able to attend to the baby. She may complete the course and earn the credit but ultimately she would not absorb any of the information taught to her as she was overwhelmed by the busywork. The ultimate goal of education is learning and retaining the information and skills taught; online education fails to accomplish that goal due to the busywork it presents and the lack of direct communication.