In rural Kansas, five high school students take seats in their school's distance learning classroom for a Mandarin language class they share with students at four other schools around the state. In Atlanta, an entire class of kindergartners sits in front of a big screen, speaking to their teacher in China. The students laugh, raise their hands, and respond to questions as if the teachers were present, not thousands of miles away. A growing number of schools are turning to distance learning options for teaching Mandarin when budgets, small class size, or a lack of local Mandarin teachers mean they wouldn't otherwise be able to offer it.