As a former professor who has taught both online and off, here's my take:
I don't know much about business schools, which do tend to attract some people who have some gas to go with their flash, but overall, I'd say that the online courses are populated by people who know theory and have very little practical knowledge. That doesn't mean you can't learn from them. But what it does mean is that they are often trapped little rats who are angry about their position in life and when you get the wrong one, they'll show it. You get poisoned information that comes from a poisoned soul and will inevitably poison you.
That said, I do know a CEO of a major (and I mean major) company who taught as a guest at a major university, but this was before it was popular to teach online. At best, I think he'd probably allow himself to be videod and have teaching assistants do any grading, dealing with students, etc.
In any case, that was a one off thing and with all due respect to my elderly friend who had once been on the cover of Forbes, his lectures seem to have been general and inspirational more than based on any hard knowledge. He was a leader, after all, and not really working from the trenches.
If you can find professors at a university who are in the trenches, that's pretty cool.
Online, however, you'll mostly find underpaid "adjunct" faculty, which means they're getting at best $800-$1600 per course that they teach and you'll be getting canned content. Could be good content, could be bad.
What you really need to think about is the quality of the other students. They're unlikely to provide the kind of valuable interaction you get here. If they do, great, but mostly it's going to be typo-ridden chatter about fuck all moderated by a professor who will have very little value to bring to the discussion and who is popping in for only as long as it takes to meet the minimum requirements so that when some admin flunky takes a screenshot and writes their report about him/her, they look like they've been active.
Keep in mind that a lot of bricks and mortar university are now running off of poorly paid adjunct faculty too. These people could be making more at McDonalds. But they don't because universities are essentially a cult based on an ascension model. They know that a certain percentage will go all the way to the top and become the high priests needed to coddle the fat bump at the bottom from whom the real money flows.
And it works great too because the graduate students essentially pay to be the slaves of this situation until they're too far into the game to turn back.
I don't want to sound sour or anything like that - I'm putting a bit of theatre into how I'm writing to make a point. Sometimes I like to think that graduate students are like entrepreneurs taking a huge risk based on profit potential. However, even though it worked out for me because my first research grant after getting my PhD paid off my 70k debt in one fell swoop, most of friends are swamped by debt and are unemployment, barely scraping by. Their job prospects: not bad if they hustle because they do have massive experience in particular areas like research and writing. But they need to be deprogrammed first and that can be hard.
The only other chance is to become a true entrepreneur and create value for other people outside of the university system because more and more people are getting paid less and less for the passion they bring to the system which means that they bring less and less passion and the whole thing becomes a sham.
Or maybe it was always that way ...
In any case, I'm glad I managed to escape the Matrix, so to speak, and even though I'm still a newb in IM and entrepreneurship, I'm damn glad I went to university and damn glad I didn't do it online. I went to two extremely liberal universities, one of which was cutting-edge and I even had Slavoj Zizek as a professor, who is one of the craziest dudes there is teaching anywhere.
You don't have to take my word for that. He's all over the net, even naked in bed spouting great philosophical ideas:
[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dp8aTYUrPi0]Philosophy from a bed view (by[/ame]
I hope this rambling helps you out. I'm not really giving you advice one way or the other. Just the perspective of a former priest who escaped the system mostly unscathed and has been finding great ways to ride the backs of Amazon and other platforms as he learns marketing, product development and essentially creates his own university based on massive value free from the politics of institutions and unhappy hacks who teach literature instead of writing it, teach business theory instead of applying it and lecture about politics instead of making change in the world by being politicians (most of them at any rate).
Selah!
