Online education will allow universities to do that even better: for one, they will provide a way for the best teachers to be recognized and promoted forsomething other than just research, a long time concern in the APT process at research universities.
So whereas we may have had the impression that this was sort of a quick and dirty operation, this is something that has been in the planning stages for a long time, just waiting for the appropriate moment where the targets could be hit.
More than athletes in any other sport, baseball players spend an inordinate amount of time standing around doing nothing and just waiting forsomething to break the monotony.