The ability and willingness to have a family, a full-time job, and earn an advanced degree should not be a negative signal.
In practice, it's currently a complete cesspool of low-quality for-profit degree mills.
I would argue that MOOCs from top tier universities far, far exceed the average online for-profit in terms of quality of content. It's ironic, considering they're free. The caveat of course is you don't get a degree, though many have options for certifying you took the class.
In my opinion, a bullshit degree is worse than no degree. The person with no degree is relying purely on skills and experience. The person with the online degree meanwhile may be of questionable caliber.
I have sympathy for people who people attain online degrees out of necessity and are fully aware they're just getting a piece of paper to satsify whatever arbitrary bureaucratic requirements. For example, it's not uncommon for a minimum level of education to be retroactively forced upon already-competent employees. The questionable caliber part comes into play when you have people who fail to realize that their obviously poor-quality online school is, well, just that.
But to that end I've heard multiple people in hiring positions whose opinion of Georgia Tech's CS program has diminished greatly because they now view them as "that school with the online Master's." I'm hope the net effect is negligible but I've heard too many people say that or agree with the sentiment to dismiss it entirely.
Online education might be a real thing one day but it's got miles and miles to go before anyone takes it seriously. Right now it's at the level of "there are pretty good lectures that you can listen to if you're curious about a topic".
As it turns out the reason most people don't do education and have a full-time job at the same time is that they are essentially incompatible. If you are dedicating enough resources to your job to not be fired, you are not taking your education seriously (unless your period of study far extends that of traditional students by many years). A serious degree program IS a full time job even if it's only a few hours of week of physical in-class time. Online is a way to cheat and pretend you can do both, when in reality you can't and one or both of them suffers a great deal.
The idea that being in a physical room and speaking to a professor in person makes you more worthy of a degree is simply not accurate. A degree should be a measure of academic ability, not a measure of physical proximity and willingness to put ones life on hold for a predetermined amount of time.
That is almost the definition of a degree. During a degree, every class expects you to devote time and resources to learning. The degree programs we see today are structured in such a way that they expect you to drop everything else and learn (or research, in graduate studies).
If you can't 'put your life on hold' in order to study you won't be able to do it quickly or coherently enough to generate the large body of knowledge that a degree represents.
Cheating is cracked down upon and students have been expelled for collusion. Exams are proctored by humans or AIs (it is easy to do eye tracking and screen scraping, it even detected me trying to open the exam from a VM and refused to open). These (Georgia Tech's, MIT's, Standford's, etc) online programs are going to eat the middle out of the rest of the university sector as the content is substantially better than most midrange universities for a fraction of the price. You may be prejudiced against online programs for whatever reason but they are here to stay at the top end and the bottom end and it is important to be able to distinguish between the two.
But… Whiteboard schools are older and most of the currently higher reputation institutions are mostly physical. Many online-only schools are lower reputation, newer, or lower tier.
Also, if the school has a cynical business model of serving students interested entirely on the piece of paper saying they attended.
You could come up with similarly derogatory things to say about Pacific Island institutions, nigh schools, etc. It's a correlation not a causation.
I think there's also reality to the task of attaining what we think of as a valid Masters Degree of PHD. A family, and a full-time job are very demanding pursuits. I commend anyone who can achieve that kind of degree with those kinds of commitments. But, I also think it's suspicious when schools see their core offering as something suitable for a full time working family man to get a masters degree in 18 months in his spare time, especially if the area tends to subjectivity.
There are really two problems with the online programs. One, many low quality ones exists. As this article depicts, the government perpetuates this problems by treating a degree like a check box—doesn’t matter where the degree is from or what it is in, just that you have it, check! Two, peoples' perception of online degrees is damaged by the first point even though good programs exist.
Personally, I find the reliance on a piece of paper with words on it way over done by the civilian world. Certainly the government using them like a checkbox is too far in the other direction, but the inherent bias people give to big names schools in the States is pure snobbery. I've found the difference between good candidates from any school to be minimal, but go to some Silicon Valley companies and all you find is prestigious schools. Lazy hiring and self-selecting cultural fit.
[1]http://www.cdm.depaul.edu/academics/Pages/MSInComputerScienc...
I'm on the job hunt now, really hoping people do not frown on the degree. However, I would still look curiously at someone who received a doctorate online.
I'm not saying online PhDs should be the norm, or even shouldn't be questioned, but doing something for 30 hours a week over 5 years at a computer shouldn't on its face be worthless compared to doing the same thing for 60 hours a week over 2.5 years in a school building.
However, I would avoid doing it 100% online if possible. Courses that were review for me and/or did not require detailed discussion I would not mind taking online again. The harder courses are a different story, as well as courses that require extensive discussion. It is really difficult to troubleshoot complex problems over blackboard.
How was the actual administration of the program? I find that your experience with the administration can drastically alter your learning potential.
Accreditation is an attempt to capture that reputation in a way that someone who has no idea about anything else can trust. Unfortunately, while you cannot game real reputation, gaming the accreditation is (almost intentionally) trivial.
A PhD, though, requires a lot of one-on-one time with a real faculty member. It's very much an apprenticeship sort of position. I've know people who did that remotely, and it's harder than doing it while being physically present. Getting a PhD while keeping a full time job is a very bad idea (I'm perfect evidence of this), and trying to do it 'online' is going to make that worse.