1st Gear
Making the Right Choice: In-Person Driving School vs. Online
Online has its place and its place is the theory, not the driving. A screen can teach you the rules of the road, the signs, the stopping distances and the questions on the theory test. What a screen cannot do is feel you ride the clutch, watch your eyes skip a mirror, or catch the roundabout lane you took halfway round. That needs a person in the car.
What online is genuinely good for
The theory test, mostly. Forty questions, thirty-five to pass, and an app is a perfectly good way to drill them until they stick. Rules, road signs, stopping distances, the knowledge side of driving, all of that lives happily on a phone and you can do it on the bus. If someone's selling you an online course for the theory, that's a fair sale.
What online cannot do
Everything that matters once the car is moving. Clutch control, observation, road position, judging a gap, reading a live junction, holding your nerve on a busy roundabout. None of it can be learned from a video, because none of it is knowledge. It's skill, and skill is built by doing the thing with someone who can see what your hands and eyes are actually doing and correct it in real time.
A course can tell you the correct way to do a reverse around the corner. It cannot see that you're steering too early, checking the wrong mirror, and drifting wide, all of which you'll do without knowing it. The whole value of an instructor is the second pair of eyes on the mistake you can't feel yourself making.
EDT settles the argument anyway
For learning to drive a car in Ireland, the twelve Essential Driver Training lessons are mandatory and they're in-person with an approved instructor, logged in a book. There's no online version of EDT, and there shouldn't be. So the real question isn't in-person versus online. It's how to use the online tools for the theory while you do the actual driving where driving is learned, in the car.
Use both, for the right jobs
The sensible learner does both. Drill the theory on a screen because it's cheap, flexible and effective for that job. Learn the driving in the car because there's no substitute and there never has been. Trouble only starts when someone believes a slick online course can replace the hours behind the wheel, and then wonders why the hill start still falls apart on a real hill.
The close
Screens for knowledge, seats for skill. Keep those two jobs separate and you'll spend your money well. Mix them up, and you'll arrive at the test with a head full of rules and hands that have never been corrected once. The tester marks the hands.