I am a high school student. However, unlike most of my friends who take a bus or drive a car to a building for the school, I do all my schooling at home. It does not mean I am home-schooled rather I attend an online school. An online school is different from a home school in many aspects.

An online school is very similar to a traditional school, but everything is done remotely through a computer. In a brick and mortar school, students enroll and attend a school with teachers. In home school, you learn from home with your parent as the teacher and they buy the curriculum to teach you. In an online school, you have real teachers using official school curriculum to teach many students via online. How does an online course works?

Generally, online courses have two parts: live sessions and course work. For each of the classes, students meet once week on live session. The teachers can talk to us through a microphone explaining slides of information, video or virtual whiteboards. Further, the students can use the chat to ask questions or talk to each other. There are different buttons that enable us to raise our hands or answer.

The second part is the major one and it takes considerably more time than the live sessions. Usually, coursework is assignments given to the students by the teacher. Most of the time, it is reading lessons from a computer or a textbook. Occasionally, it also comprises of essays, worksheets, virtual science labs, and discussions. The teacher gives us due dates for our coursework.

Online courses offer flexibility contrary to a traditional school, which consumes the same amount of time for each class and then you are on your own for the homework. In an online course, a very little amount of time is consumed for live sessions and most of the time is spent to figure out how to get the work done. It offers the flexibility of allocating your own time for the learning. Further, if you cannot make it to a live session, you can them later on recording. Thus, with online schools, you are in control of managing your time. In addition, online schools occasionally organize field trips, which could be a great opportunity to meet other students and teachers. Hence, online schooling is advantageous to many students who prefer to study from home. If you want to study law from home, many law schools in California offer online courses.