But, increasingly, and especially in technical fields, degrees are being supplanted by other talent or qualification indicators. Open source work is a great example. There are significant numbers of folks without CS degrees (or even degrees at all) who have found gainful employment as coders based on their open source work alone. Whether it will be accepted by the Fortune 500 crowd remains to be seen though, and certainly the "show me what you can do" idea doesn't really work for non-technical jobs.
At least in the short term offering a degree for these online courses might help.
I wonder if for the non-technical crowd who can't show what they've learned an online degree will be thought of in the same light as a traditional brick and mortar one. It isn't so far, but that will almost certainly change if that degree comes from some place like MIT or Harvard.