Online degrees, especially at the undergraduate level, will not become the norm. If there is one thing that is almost universally agreed upon about the spring quarter, it's that remote learning blows and isn't close to comparable to the educational experience of being on campus, in classrooms and dorms, with other students.
I know the thread's about Yale but hearing this, I would be surprised to hear that DC is a faculty member at a college/university, because:
In the first case, this emergency situation was not a meaningful test of the online model that will be more prevalent-ingrained by Fall 2021, that the crisis itself pushed along; and it was barely a reasonable test of extant remote learning tools, as there was little in place besides Blackboard (for example) in which both teachers and students were fluent. Courses that were already online were not affected with near the degree of disruption that "live" classes were, as faculty and student expectations and protocols were already known.
During this whole societal interruption, the maximum flood of training modules, WebEx seminars, remote learning conferences and tutorials have been flooding the faculty with voluminous, focused sessions offered almost all summer long. If one is lagging or hoping to return to normalcy as opposed to getting these tools down pat, there will be accountability (at least in my venues). If you are an Instructional Technology Designer you are going to be in fish and loaves for the next decade.
A bigger question is the disparity of tools that students have to do online course work... not all students (especially Community College students) have adequate access to technology or have to compete in a financially challenged home whose parent(s) may be needing the bandwith/connection...some don't have laptops or PCS and relied on the school locus to do most of their work... an online model will also have to better tackle the tangent resources of the library, the labs, and the extra curriculars that support the overall mission. WebEx and Zoom don't shine as virtual tools when some portion of the class doesn't have the compatible hardware/fluency to use them...
One concession I will make to the spirit of Dan's post (which seems so perfectly familiar of the contemporary parent of a remote college learner) is that both myself - and I suspect faculty at large - gave utmost forbearance and tolerance for the oft ragged work of students after the March 12-15 closures... though Spring Break was a natural pause in the term, it was too late in to assign the normal weight to post -quarantining lesson units... so if students had a good record when classes were live and stayed reasonably engaged with the materials via the sea change of all-remote... they were rewarded in greater measure than they were demeritted for failures to do so... I had to exercise compassion before normal discipline. If one portion of one class/one semester was forever ruined by the disruptions of switching to remote learning in a global crisis... so be it.
It was tough and varied...I had 68 students in four classes at two schools... I had some straight B+/A kids withdraw without so much as an email...I had flagging students pick it up and use it as a chance to earn amnesty for previous failures... I had 4 students who lost household members to the virus and a total of 8 who reported having it themselves. I had lazy average students do their best to obfuscate and feign confusion over remote procedures... the vast majority of them did almost/as well as they would've in the normal environment.
Again to repeat, saying online learning blows and will not become the norm from this emergency environment is like saying in 1997, the internet blows and will never last because the dial up speeds in 1997 were shitty... or you couldn't yet download music at a click...and there was no Wikipedia or YouTube...
If we are truly entering a new world of contagion-awareness and social risk, the dorms and sports will go before the remote learning goes, whether it blows or not.