For decades, one of the best series of guides on distance learning, unaccredited learning, and unusual schools have been the Bear's guides written by John Bear and now by Bear with the assistance of his wife. They maintain a website, and their books are published by Ten Speed Press, which also published What Color is my Parachute, the classic guide to the job search.
Questions about the quality of online education of course immediately raise questions about how anyone measures the quality of any form of education. How do you compare the learning achieved in a widely known college to the learning achieved in a less widely known school? One answer may be simply that schools that have high reputations and admissions standards can choose extraordinarily talented students. From that point, it doesn't much matter what happens in the classroom. The output is guaranteed to be good because the student input is good.
Newer online schools arose for two reasons. The founder of the University of Phoenix was interested in challenging the dominant model of education. Others in the past have also created experimental colleges because of philosophical commitments to a different kind of education.
A second motivation for creating new schools is the profit motive.
The problem posed by for-profit schools is that they can generate revenue by lowering admissions standards and hiring lots of poorly paid part time faculty who may not have the credentials of full time college faculty. You could argue, of course, that some of those people with lower entry scores are in fact highly talented individuals who have straightened out their lives. They ought to have a chance. And you can argue that some of those faculty are likewise gifted but have not found regular positions because there just are not enough professorial positions available. These are the kinds of ambiguities that make it difficult to judge whether a particular online school is really offering an education equivalent to what you may get at a hypothetical, perfect private or public university.
I made a point of teaching at one proprietary for-profit school to gather my own impressions. Was the syllabus as good as any other college. Probably. Was the level of work required equivalent for the number of credits? Not really. On the other hand, the level of dialogue in the classroom was far above what I normally experience, because all the students were working adults who had a lot to say and plenty of wisdom to bring to the discussions. I was least satisfied with the quality of the students' written work. They could have used some intensive work on writing research reports and a refresher of high school grammar.
I too would be interested to see others' comments on this topic--especially reports from people who have experienced online education and some of the compressed educational schedules offered by schools like Phoenix.