Online learning has been a great thing in that it has opened up education opportunities to people who otherwise might not be able to get a degree. Unfortunately there are also some downsides to online learning and you have to make sure that you understand what these are if you are considering getting a degree online. It may not be the best option for you.
The biggest danger of online education is that of credential inflation. In fact this is something that we are already seeing quite a bit of. Since it is so easy to get a degree nowadays a large number of people have done just that. This has made it harder to stand out and required people to get more education. For example it used to be that a Masters of Business Administration was a virtual guarantee of a promotion to management. Nowadays so many people have them that in order to stand out people are now starting to pursue Doctor of Business Administration degrees.
The reason that credential inflation is a problem is that it requires people to pursue more education than they really need. These days a bachelors degree is becoming about the same as a high school diploma used to be a few years ago. This wouldn't be a problem if getting an education were free but of course it costs quite a bit of money. This has had the result of keeping a lot of people out of jobs that they are capable of doing but simply can't afford to get the education that employers now require. Given that most of this education is completely unnecessary to do the job it has really placed an unnecessary expense on a lot of people.
The other danger of online education goes hand in hand with credential inflation and that is that the quality of the education has greatly declined. There are plenty of good schools and you can certainly get a quality education online. The problem is that dozens of for profit schools have entered the business and in a lot of cases the degrees that they offer are of questionable value. Really in many cases they are just selling the required credential that people need to get ahead at work.
The danger of for profit online education providers is that they have a financial stake in seeing as many people as possible get a degree. This means that the standards have been lowered to ensure that everybody who has the money gets through the program. This wouldn't be a problem if employers and the general public knew which schools were doing this. Unfortunately as it stands now the entire online learning community gets smeared by these degrees of questionable value. This of course lowers the value of an online degree even if you got it through a good quality school.