text: Online courses are not beneficial to students learning as without an educational professional present to guide them, students can easily struggle to comprehend difficult concepts. Generally one may assume the ability for students taking online courses to work at their own pace makes it more valuable than structured and scheduled lessons in the classroom, but this is usually not the case. I myself enrolled in an online geometry course during one summer and although there were occasional scheduled conference calls, a majority of the course was done independently and free of assistance. Working at your own pace isn't so appealing once a student has been presented an overwhelming amount of difficult material to learn with no other guidance, requiring many more hours dedicated to struggling to comprehend material than if they had a qualified teacher present. Additionally, these courses usually require a specific amount of learning to be completed each day, so the idea a student can leisurely complete assignments is a huge misconception. Although I recognize other students experiences taking online courses may have been different than mine, the structure of my class is a good representation of what most of the other online courses in my county would have been like.