Online acting training stopped being a compromise somewhere around 2021, and the industry has not entirely caught up with what that means. Some of it is now genuinely better than the in person equivalent. Quite a lot of it is worse than nothing. The difference is predictable once you know what to look for.
What online does well
Self tape technique is the obvious one, and it is not a small thing. Most of your auditions now happen in your own room, against your own wall, with your own lighting and your own reader. That is a distinct skill with its own craft, and it is best taught in exactly the setting where you will use it.
A teacher watching your actual tape, shot in your actual space, can fix problems that no studio class will ever surface. Your framing, your eyeline, the lamp that makes you look tired, the reader who is throwing your timing off.
Accent and dialect work also translates well, because it is largely ear and repetition, and a recording you can replay is more useful than a memory of a class.
Access is the quiet one. A teacher whose work you want is no longer limited to the ones within traveling distance of where you live.
What online does badly
Anything that depends on physical presence between people. Stage combat, obviously. Movement and physical technique, mostly. Scene work where the whole point is what passes between two actors in a room, partly: it can be done, but latency breaks timing, and timing is a great deal of what you are there to learn.
Ensemble work does not survive the move. Neither does the part of training that is simply being in a room with other people who are serious about it.
How to tell a good course from a bad one
Two questions separate them, and neither is about the curriculum.
How many people are in the session, and will I work? A class of forty where six people are seen is a lecture that costs class money. Ask directly how many participants there are and how often each one is up. If the answer is vague, it is because the answer is bad.
Who is teaching, and what have they actually done? Not "industry professional". A name, and credits you can check. The online market has a large number of courses taught by people whose main qualification is having made a course.
The pre recorded question
Recorded material is fine for information and useless for craft. You can learn what a casting director is looking for from a video. You cannot learn to act from one, because nobody is watching you and the entire value of training is being watched by somebody who can tell you what you are actually doing.
If a course is entirely pre recorded, price it as a book, because that is what it is.
What this means practically
Use online for the specific and the technical: self tape, dialect, audition material, access to a teacher you could not otherwise reach. Use in person for the physical, the ensemble, and the sustained work that builds over months.
And whatever you train in, put it on your resume with the teacher's name, because a named teacher a reader recognizes is worth more than three lines of workshop titles.
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