Not just me; most of my colleagues in the Cal State University opposed them because we did not trust the administration to offer online degrees with the same rigor as those taught by expert faculty, in person. The admin treated those courses as cash cows, without any effective enrollment ceiling (some faculty who taught in those programs refused to take more students than they could handle, but many just did what they were told). They also insisted that the university owned the intellectual property rights for the classes and after some minimum number of offerings, many of the online classes could be handed off to grad assistants who worked for slave wages, or to part time lecturers at the bottom of the faculty pay scale. That made the issue a faculty union matter.
It's ironic that when the COVID pandemic forced all class meetings online, the faculty did a generally good job of distance teaching, although I think most of us remained uncomfortably aware of the shortfalls of online instruction. But I can assure you that saving students money was NEVER part of the discussion about online degree programs. Ever.
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