Distance Education easy?

I've seen various mentions of how much easier it is to get a degree online than it would be to get the equivalent degree on a traditional college campus. I'm only halfway through my first semester, so I can't say whether that's true or not, but it certainly doesn't seem easy to me so far.

In fact, I feel like it's more work in some ways than if I were taking a similar class in person. For example, in my Design and Production of Network Multimedia class, we have to do regular homework (individual exercises), readings, a larger group project, quizzes, and lectures - this is all roughly equivalent to the work I would expect if I were to attend a similar class in person.

We also have to take online tutorials on our own time covering material that in a regular class would be taught in class during lecture (and it's not that we don't have lectures too, because we do, but they are awkward text chats that are hard to follow and mostly good only for getting questions answered, but not really useful if you didn't do all the readings and the online tutorials already). Lastly, we have to write roughly 500 words a week of thoughtful discussion board posts to get the "class participation" part of the grade, something that if this were not an online course would be part of normal class discussion. I know 500 words a week doesn't seem like a lot, but in order to write really good posts, they often end up longer, and writing 500 words takes up more time and energy than just doing your readings and participating in a verbal class discussion.

My other course doesn't have quite so much work outside of class - only readings, a midterm and a final essay, and once every four weeks it's my turn to write up my group's weekly discussion summary, but there is a LOT of reading most weeks, and if you don't do all of it (or at least most of it) you'll be lost when it comes time for the week's group discussions.

In other words, if some people are getting by with good grades in an online program without a lot of work, they must be in a different program than I'm in, because FSU's online library science program is a lot of work so far.