I'd be very surprised if the work is equal. I know in theory it should be, but I think reality is that it will have to be much more programatically grade-able and won't be.
I thought/have heard secondhand here that MS was more along those lines, but I may be completely wrong there.
Especially at larger universities, the question is the availability of TAs -- every assignment in all three classes so far has had writing components that require human grading.
Online students require a significantly lower load of in-person support (office hours, multiple lab sections, etc) because they're expected to do more self-teaching.
Stanford's public machine learning and other CS courses with their 10's of thousands of completing students, or EdX's Harvard CS50 class with its 1000's of students are good examples where grading against a rubric seems to scale.