Online learning used to feel like a fringe choice. That’s changed.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 5.2% of K-12 students received academic instruction at home during the 2022-23 school year, up from 3.7% before the pandemic.

Data from the Johns Hopkins Homeschool Research Lab shows that homeschooling grew at an average rate of 4.9% in the 2024-25 school year, nearly three times the pre-pandemic rate, with 36% of reporting states recording their highest enrollment numbers ever.

More families than ever are considering online education for their children.

And if you’re one of them, you’re probably trying to sort through a lot of information and a lot of opinions to figure out whether this could actually work for your family.

This guide is meant to help. We’ll walk through the real advantages and real disadvantages of online learning, specifically for K-12 families, so you can weigh them honestly.

Because the answer to “Is online learning good?” is almost always “It depends,” and the details matter more than the category.

5 Advantages of Online Learning

1. Flexibility That Fits Your Family’s Life

This is the advantage most families notice first, and for good reason.

Online learning frees your family from a fixed bell schedule. Your student can learn when they’re most alert and engaged, not when a bus route dictates.

For families with multiple children at different stages, or families whose work schedules don’t conform to the 8-to-3 school day, this flexibility can be transformative. It means your high schooler can do her best thinking in the morning and free up afternoons for music, sports, or work. It means you can take a family trip without falling behind, or structure your week around your family’s rhythms instead of someone else’s calendar.

Flexibility doesn’t mean less structure, though.

The best online programs still provide clear expectations, deadlines, and rhythms. The difference is that you and your student get to build those rhythms together.

2. Access to Instruction You Couldn’t Get Locally

Geography used to determine your child’s educational options. If your town didn’t have a teacher who could teach Latin, or logic, or upper-level chemistry, those subjects simply weren’t available.

Online learning changes that equation entirely. A family in rural Wyoming and a family in suburban Virginia can access the same teacher, the same curriculum, and the same quality of instruction. This is especially meaningful for subjects that require specialized expertise. Classical languages, advanced math, rhetoric, philosophy: these aren’t courses every local school or co-op can offer, but they’re available online to any family with a reliable internet connection.

This is one of the reasons online classical education has grown significantly over the past two decades. Families who want a rigorous liberal arts education for their children no longer have to live near a classical school to get one.

(And by the way, if you’re interested in classical education, be sure to check out our complete parent’s guide!)

3. A Learning Environment You Can Shape

When your child learns at home, you have a say in the environment. You can create a space that’s calm, focused, and free from many of the distractions and pressures that come with a traditional school setting.

You also have more visibility into what’s being taught and how. For many families, this matters a great deal. In a 2024 NCES survey, 83% of homeschooling parents cited concern about the environment of other schools as a reason for educating at home.

Whether that concern is about safety, about culture, or about the content and values being taught, online learning gives parents a seat at the table.

This visibility is an opportunity. When you can see what your child is studying, you can have real conversations about it over dinner. You can connect what they’re learning to your family’s faith, your values, and the world around them.

4. The Ability to Match Pace to the Student

Every child learns differently. Some grasp new concepts quickly and grow restless when the class moves too slowly. Others need more time to sit with an idea, wrestle with it, and truly understand it before moving on. In a traditional classroom of 25 or 30 students, the pace is set for the middle, which means it’s rarely right for anyone in particular.

Online learning can address this in a couple of ways.

Self-paced programs let students work through material on their own schedule, spending more time where they need it and moving ahead where they don’t.

Live online classes can offer smaller groups where teachers have more room to know each student and adjust accordingly.

Either way, the goal is the same: learning that actually fits the learner.

5. Students Can Develop Real Ownership of Their Education

There’s a skill set that online learning develops almost by necessity: self-management. When your student is responsible for organizing their time, completing their work, and showing up prepared, they’re building habits that will serve them well beyond school.

This is worth naming because it’s easy to overlook. The student who learns to manage a weekly schedule of assignments, to ask questions when they don’t understand something, and to push through material that challenges them is developing the kind of independence that colleges and employers value deeply.

Research from the National Home Education Research Institute consistently finds that homeschooled students tend to perform well in college, both in terms of GPA and graduation rates. There are many factors behind that, but one of them is the self-direction that home-based education cultivates.

5 Disadvantages of Online Learning

No educational model is perfect. If you’re weighing this option for your family, these are the questions you should be asking.

1. Screen Time Is a Real Concern

Let’s start here, because it’s probably what you’re thinking about.

You've seen the headlines about screen time and children's health, and your instinct to pay attention to them is a good one. Research does show that excessive recreational screen time can affect sleep, attention, and emotional regulation in children and adolescents. Those findings are real, and parents are right to take them seriously.

But before you weigh online learning against traditional school on screen time alone, it's worth taking a closer look at what a traditional school day actually involves. Most K-12 students today spend significant portions of their school day on Chromebooks, tablets, or interactive whiteboards. That's before you add the commute, the transition time between classes, and the passive screen time that often fills the afternoon after dismissal. The assumption that brick-and-mortar schooling is a low-screen environment doesn't always hold up when you look at the full shape of the day.

You’ve seen the headlines about screen time and children’s health, and your instinct to pay attention to them is a good one. Research does show that excessive recreational screen time can affect sleep, attention, and emotional regulation in children and adolescents. Those findings are real, and parents are right to take them seriously.

But the research also reveals an important nuance that often gets lost in the headlines.

The type of screen time matters. A longitudinal study on children’s cognitive and emotional development found that educational screen time showed positive effects on persistence and educational outcomes with no significant negative impact on health. Passive screen time, by contrast, showed the least healthy results. As one researcher at CHOC noted, there’s likely a meaningful difference between watching a documentary and mindlessly scrolling, or between playing a cooperative problem-solving game and consuming content passively.

A student who is reading a primary source on screen, taking notes during a live discussion of Homer, or working through a logic problem is doing something qualitatively different from a student scrolling social media for three hours.

That said, the concern isn’t unfounded just because the type of screen time matters.

Even educational screen time adds to the total time your child spends looking at a screen each day. The practical response isn’t to avoid screens altogether, which isn’t realistic, but to be intentional. Build offline rhythms into your family’s day. Make time for reading physical books, playing outside, doing hands-on work, and simply being bored for a while.

The screen is a tool, and like any tool, how you use it matters more than whether you use it.

2. Socialization Requires More Intentionality

This is probably the most common concern parents raise about online learning, and it deserves a thoughtful answer rather than a quick dismissal.

The concern makes sense. If your child isn't in a building with 500 other students every day, they're going to have fewer casual social interactions: hallway conversations, lunchroom friendships, the organic social learning that happens when kids are packed together for seven hours.

That's real. And for some families, especially families with children who are naturally extroverted and thrive on constant peer interaction, it's a significant consideration.

What's also real is that the research on homeschooled students' social development is more encouraging than you might expect. Dr. Brian Ray's research through the National Home Education Research Institute has consistently found that homeschooled students score above average on measures of social, emotional, and psychological development. The stereotype of the isolated homeschooler doesn't match the data.

But there's a deeper point worth making here, one that often gets missed in the conversation about online socialization: the relationships that form in a good live online program can be genuinely deep, not a pale imitation of in-person friendships but something real in their own right. Students who discuss the Great Books together, debate ideas in a rhetoric class, and work through hard material alongside the same cohort year after year aren't just sharing a screen. They're sharing an intellectual and moral formation. That's a different kind of bond than the one formed in a hallway between classes, and for many students, it's a more meaningful one.

At Veritas Scholars Academy, we've watched this play out in ways that continue to surprise even us. Students who have never met in person become close friends across state lines and time zones. They attend the End of Year Gathering and pick up conversations they've been having in class for months. Some have stayed in each other's lives long after graduation. We've even had students who first met in a VSA classroom later get married. The community that forms in a live online classroom, when the program is built with community in mind, isn't second-rate. For many students, it's the most intellectually serious and lasting friendships they'll form.

The key difference is that socialization in an online learning environment has to be pursued with purpose rather than absorbed passively. For most families, this looks like a combination of things: live online classes where students interact with teachers and peers in real time, involvement in church, community sports, music, and other activities. There's something to be said, too, for the kind of socialization that happens at home: learning to have a conversation with adults, to interact with siblings of different ages, to navigate community relationships outside of a peer-only environment. These are social skills that matter.

That said, if your family chooses online learning, building community into your life will take effort. It won't happen automatically. It's worth planning for from the beginning.

3. Self-Discipline Is Required, and Not Every Student Has It Yet

Online learning puts more responsibility on the student. That can be a real strength for a mature, motivated learner, and a genuine struggle for a younger or less disciplined one.

Without the external structure of a physical classroom, a student has to manage their own time, resist distractions at home, and maintain focus even when no one is watching. Some students take to this naturally. Others need more scaffolding, more accountability, and more parental involvement to stay on track.

This is where knowing your student really matters. A self-paced course gives a self-motivated learner room to move at their own speed, which for the right student is genuinely freeing. A live class can provide more built-in structure and external rhythm, which some students need, especially earlier on.

Neither format is inherently better. They ask different things of the student.

If your child is younger, or if they haven’t yet developed strong study habits, think honestly about what kind of support they need right now. Some families start with more structured formats and move toward more independence as their student matures. Others find that a self-paced environment is exactly where their child thrives from the beginning.

Either way, the goal is to meet your child where they are and help them grow from there.

4. Not All Online Programs Are Created Equal

This might be the most important thing to understand about online learning. The category is huge, and the range of quality within it is just as wide.

A pre-recorded video course, a self-paced curriculum with rich materials and built-in assessments, and a live Socratic discussion are all online learning, but they’re very different experiences.

Each can be done well or done poorly, so the question isn’t which format is best in the abstract but which format is best for your student, and whether the specific program you’re considering does that format well.

When you’re evaluating programs, the questions worth asking include:

• What does the day-to-day learning experience look like? Is it live instruction, self-paced work, or a blend? And does that match what your student needs?

• Is there real interaction with a teacher who knows my student, whether that’s live discussion or meaningful feedback on their work?

• What’s the educational philosophy behind the curriculum? Is it coherent, or is it a collection of disconnected courses?

• Is there a community, or is my family on our own?

• What are the teachers’ qualifications, and are they invested in what they’re teaching?

• What worldview shapes the material?

The answers to these questions will tell you far more about the quality of an online program than any marketing page.

5. Technology Can Be a Barrier

This one is straightforward but worth acknowledging.

Online learning requires reliable internet, a functional device, and at least a basic level of comfort with technology. For many families, this is a non-issue. For others, especially families in rural areas with limited broadband access, it can be a genuine obstacle. If your internet connection is unreliable, live online classes are going to be frustrating for everyone involved.

It’s worth testing your setup before committing to a program, and asking any program you’re considering about their technical requirements and what support they offer when things go wrong.

The Question Behind the Question

Most parents who search for “advantages and disadvantages of online learning” aren’t really looking for a pros-and-cons list. They’re trying to answer a deeper question:

Will this actually work for my child? For our family?

The honest answer is that it depends on the program, the student, and the support system around them. Online learning can be genuinely excellent, and it can be deeply mediocre. The model itself is neutral. What matters is what fills it.

The programs that tend to work well for families share a few characteristics: they have a clear educational philosophy that holds everything together, they prioritize live human interaction over passive content consumption, they hire teachers who are both knowledgeable and invested, and they build community so that families aren’t going through this alone.

At Veritas Press, this is the approach we’ve taken for over 25 years. Our live online classes through Veritas Scholars Academy are built around Socratic discussion, taught by teachers who care deeply about their subjects and their students, and grounded in a classical Christian vision of education. We also offer Self-Paced and You-Teach options for families who want more flexibility or more hands-on involvement. But whatever the format, the foundation is the same: we believe education should teach students how to think, root them in truth, and prepare them for life.

We mention this not as a sales pitch but because if you’re weighing the advantages and disadvantages of online learning, it’s helpful to know that programs like this exist. The concerns about screen time, socialization, and quality that we’ve discussed in this article are concerns we’ve been thinking about and designing around for a long time.

Where to Go from Here

If you’re still weighing your options, here are a few practical steps:

Talk to families who are doing it. Not just families who love their program, but families who’ve been at it for a few years and can speak honestly about both the rewards and the challenges. Their experience will tell you more than any article can.

Ask to sit in on a class. A good program will let you observe before you commit. Watch how the teacher interacts with students. Notice whether the students are engaged or just present. Pay attention to whether it feels like a real classroom or just a screen.

Be honest about your student. What does your child need right now? Structure or independence? More accountability or more freedom? A program that fits your student today is more valuable than one that sounds ideal in theory.

Think about community. How will your family stay connected to other people? What does your plan for socialization and friendship look like?

You’re asking good questions. The fact that you’re doing this research carefully says something about the kind of parent you are and the kind of education you want for your child.

Whatever you decide, that thoughtfulness is going to serve your family well.