I earned a [mostly] online engineering masters degree a few years ago (in industrial engineering, from NC State, which I think is generally ranked in the top 10

I earned a [mostly] online engineering masters degree a few years ago (in industrial engineering, from NC State, which I think is generally ranked in the top 10-15 programs nationally), and I had a great experience. Since I live near the campus I had the option of attending lectures in person if I wanted to (they have since changed the policy and distance ed students are distance only, unless the prof looks the other way), but my feedback to them would be similar to your idea: provide the lectures themselves as pre-recorded content, then set aside the actual lecture time to work through and review problems & questions. This serves to free a couple/few hours a week from the professor's schedule and dedicate it to student interaction, and it allows the students to make productive use of their instructional time. As others have noted, being lectured at for an hour is seldom educational, especially in technical fields. As an undergrad [at UVA], after my first year I explicitly sought out classes that had no more than 40-60 students, preferably fewer, just to get more 1:1ish time. That said, a lot of my best learning experiences were in courses taught by TAs, not research professors.