It's a myth that online education is cheaper than brick-and-mortar education. It requires a vast and sophisticated IT infrastructure that must be constantly maintained and updated by an ever-expanding army of tech support staff. Older buildings must be significantly renovated to accommodate this new infrastructure. Anyone who thinks online teaching should save the cost of building extra structures should visit a nearby university and notice how much construction is being done. Partly for reasons of appearance and recruiting and partly for the need to accommodate the needs of contemporary technology, universities need to add new buildings and renovate old ones constantly.
Teaching an online class takes more time and preparation on the part of the instructor than a traditional class. Just as electronic records have made the physician's job more demanding and reduced their time with patients, electronic records have made most jobs in higher education more time consuming and take away from the time we can spend with students.
Online education works best in programs for adults who are already working in their fields of interest and who need more education to advance their careers: business, criminal justice, nursing, public administration, social work, computer science, etc. It is not a fitting model to replace everything a young adult needs to experience as part of a college education: interacting with people from all over the country and the world, exploring various career paths to find what's best for them, and learning how to get along with people who have very different backgrounds and outlooks. Plus, online education requires a level of self-discipline and self-direction that are often still in the development stage for traditional college students.
Online classes that are part of a major are probably decent. Probably quite good if part of a graduate or professional degree. The department takes pride in those. In general education courses, the level of shoddy teaching and damn near fraud can be shocking. It is not unusual for teachers to barely interact with students and then essentially bribe the students into silence by giving them good grades. That should definitely be investigated and blown to pieces.
If Justin Fields is getting a decent education with so many online classes, he is the exception, not the rule. I used to work in online education but do not anymore, for obvious reasons. Fancy IT cannot replace the value of a 45-minute conversation with a student who needs to talk through their major interests, career interests, their sense of calling, life experiences, triumphs and setbacks, and how they are growing and changing because of what they learn inside and outside the classroom. Face-to-face interaction with students is one of the joys of my life, and I learned through hard experience that online formats cannot duplicate that experience.
