How CourseHero and Quizlet Changes Lives... Sort of.

In the William S. Hart School District, high school students have the opportunity to take A-G courses at the local community college either online, in-class or hybrid. However, behind all the glam and glitter of finding backdoors to attend our local high schools as little as possible, this privilege we're able to utilize so gracefully isn't really a good thing. Ultimately, our high school curriculum does indeed provide a couple courses that would prove to be relevant to teenagers future lives. Our required senior courses, American Government and Economics, are genuinely important classes that would prove to benefit students in their political knowledge and entrepreneurial mindsets.

However, my personal experiences with these online courses were not classes of true glam and glitter; rather, they were of disappointment and discouraging of a genuine learning experience.

Upon registering for the courses, I was greeted with the most depressing, unenthusiastic introduction to Macroeconomics and American Government. "Welcome to Macroeconomics/American Government 201/150. Over the course of this internet distance-based learning experience, we will..." I was given no deadlines but the last day for Econ. I was given a deadline every four days for Gov.

Immediately after clicking on the first "online exercise," a simple Ctrl+C followed by a Ctrl+V into Google instantly lead me to Quizlet sets and CourseHero trials that held entire chapters worth of the exact courses I was "learning."

Instead of having the opportunity to educate myself on topics such as the changes in the global economy and American politics, I was only taught to robotically do the following for the course of both classes: copy, open new tab, paste, submit. I was taught to procrastinate and find new ways to cheat.

When can we find a new way to take courses (online, in-class or hybrid), and genuinely find passion and incentive to learn about these topics without feeling the need to cheat or discover backdoors to just simply "complete" the course? Where can we find the personal initiative and drive to make us want to go out of our way to educate ourselves again? I don't know. But unfortunately, CourseHero and Quizlet have contributed to the lack of educational enthusiasm located in our public high schools.