I agree. With the advent of e-learning, some institutions strive to place all courses of programs online; even though, as you pointed out, the content of some courses may not lend itself to the requisite instructional treatment to facilitate meaningful learning experiences in an online environment. The end result in such situations is that those institutions receive course evaluation results which point to student dissatisfaction.
On the other hand, I have worked with Instructors in the Pharmacology and Health Sciences, Occupational Therapy, Physiotherapy, and similar fields who adopt a combination of on-the-ground classroom delivery and online learning.
Now having said this, one has to examine the primary reason for some Institutions placing the entire program online. The primary reason seems to be driven by increasing enrollments by reaching out to a wider geographical audience, at the national as well as the international level. The hybrid approach is successful an institution targets students who live within reasonable traveling distance to the institution.
Of course, some argue that modern telecommunication technologies, video-conferencing, for example, can approximate the learning experience of classroom environments. I do not believe so as the adoption of some of these technologies introduce factors which work against one of the main proponents of online learning—the ability to participate in learning activities at any time once one has access to the Internet. The human presence in a traditional classroom environment is essential to promote a wide range of learning outcomes that cannot be successfully replicated nor measured in an online environment.
In conclusion, I want to share with you a decision one Dean of one institution with whom I worked made when he was given the mandate to place his entire program online. He maintained that the credibility of his program will suffer. I agreed with him because we were looking at a professional degree in healthcare, the learning outcomes of which were primarily performance-based rather than knowledge-based.
