I wouldn't view it quite as high, but you can still get a very good education over the internet if you apply yourself. This is based on me taking a couple courses online at my university so I didn't have to spend quite as much time at school, and had the freedom of participating in a class when I had the time.
The first class I took was Astronomy 106, and I thought it was a complete and total joke. We had a lab book that we had to do, and could choose out 10 of them. It turned out that there were 10 of them you could do that involved never once going in and getting hands on experience with a telescope or anything of that sort. The online homework was easy, and the proctored exams were easy.
The second was Econ 206 (Microeconomics). I also took Econ 195 and 205 at my school, and I will say that I learned more through the online course than I did through the courses at the school. We used a program called Aplia for homework, which was also used in Econ 205, so in that aspect, both those classes were the same. Each week, we also had to participate in online discussions on a school forum with our classmates and answer economic questions and our thoughts about them and how our current chapter applies to them. The teacher committed some serious time towards these forums, and would respond to what we said, put forth his own thoughts, etc. The proctored tests for this course were just as difficult as a test I would have in a course I take on campus.
So I guess what I'm getting at is that it really matters on the teacher and/or methods of teaching, as well as how much effort you actually want to put towards it. Personally, I would say a 3.9 gpa, even for online courses, is pretty damned good.
Money can't buy happiness. Just video games, which make me happy.
