text: Across America, small, understaffed schools struggle to teach their students. While these schools can offer essential classes, such as academic English, history, sciences, and mathematics, some are unable to provide more flavorful classes like creative writing, human geography, or computer science. Some schools even struggle to teach advanced core classes, such as honors, IB, or AP. This is because such specific or advanced classes require qualified and specialized teachers- a resource some areas simply do not have. This restricts these students, since they cannot take classes relating to their personal interests, or classes with college credit. Through distance learning, these students could have the opportunity to take classes their schools don't offer. This benefit isn't restricted to underprivileged areas, however. Specialized teachers (or even professors) provide courses on a wide variety of interesting, challenging subjects that are not found in high schools, or even most colleges. Students can take online courses from influential entities like NASA and Microsoft, and earn college credit at the same time. Distance learning dramatically increases the scope of education and gives students learning opportunities they would not find otherwise.