I don't know what University you went to but having known people who "partied their way through the Ivy league" (by their own admission) I feel pretty confident that people can get through any 4 year university without working all that hard. So even if you did work really hard your degree was probably "invalidated" by those people far before this came along.
Beyond that I'd present the question that's already been asked: What makes you think people who get degrees online aren't working hard? Did you study 18 hours a day like the woman in the article? I suspect not.
Well, not my college and not my degree. For my degree you had to work your ass off and there was no way around that. My major started with more than 200 people and about thirty something of us graduated. In some of the early classes professors would fail half the class without batting an eyelid.
And it was not considered a super elite school or anything. It was just an engineering degree in a school where the faculty took the subject seriously. So, I am very sure nobody in my major partied through it, in fact I was probably the biggest partier of them all but i still had to work my ass off for the difficult classes.
Of course there always are majors that can be partied through, we all know the bs majors out there.
Well it is possible that people with on-line degrees are in fact working hard, but it is very hard to believe. What is their incentive to fail people that do not learn the subject? What is their incentive to even teach the subject properly? For reputable universities this usually comes down to the personal integrity of the professor. They have academic reputations to defend and make sure that their students know what their supposed to know or don't pass. For on-line colleges the "professor" is a random badly paid employee, and the student is a customer that will stop paying if he/she gets pissed off.
The woman in the article studied 18 hours a day because the on-line school offered a flat fee per month so she just decided to take as many classes as possible to get her money's worth.
You know, the best programmers/engineers I have known did almost no course work. The material was so easy they breezed through, while reading papers of interest or doing extra research projects with faculty.
If you are truly interested in your field, you should rarely cover new material in undergraduate courses.
> What is their incentive to fail people that do not learn the subject? What is their incentive to even teach the subject properly?
Keeping their job?
If a company like StraighterLine wants to be taken seriously, they'll need to ensure people that they are giving quality classes and only passing people who learn the material.
My guess is that they'll end up some how auditing the professors, maybe randomly looking at tests to see if the people understand the material, etc... Maybe they'll find some other mechanism, but as long as a good education is valued by employers, StraighterLine will need to find a way to prove it is giving one.
To be honest, my only real issue with treating these courses as accredited is the difficulty in validating who took the class (e.g. making sure someone didn't ask their friend to take the exams for them).
Beyond that I'd present the question that's already been asked: What makes you think people who get degrees online aren't working hard? Did you study 18 hours a day like the woman in the article? I suspect not.