As Marshall McLuhan said, "The medium is the message." Some F2F classes can't be turned into online classes, and that means some kinds of knowledge, learning, and interaction are going to die.
Students like highly structured courses with clear goals, assignments, and expectations. They also prefer information in brief, easily digested lessons about things with an obvious application. They see themselves as customers. The degree is the product they are purchasing, and the instructor is a sales associate helping them with the transaction.
Student evaluations bear this out, but the only meaningful course evaluations would be ones given five or ten years after the class. Often, the things students thought were irrelevant turn out to be important. Their jobs and lives never consist of structured, predictable, conveniently portioned information and simple tasks. Students might hate classes that force them to figure out how to do an assignment, or that require difficult reading, but those classes are much better preparation for their careers and lives after college.
The deeper I get into online teaching, the more skeptical I am about its value. If the outcome is that a student can pass a test or point to a portfolio of completed assignments, and if "facilitating" a class means making it as easy as possible for a student to accomplish this, then no real teaching or learning is going to occur.
