Florida House Speaker Will Weatherford says the state must embrace online learning to produce enough university graduates in coming years.
On Tuesday he told a forum sponsored by the Orlando Sentinel the Board of Governors has a goal of producing 90,000 academic degrees by the year 2025.
Weatherford said Florida can't build enough universities to support all those degrees without online technology.
"We don't have the resources to build out that type of infrastructure", Weatherford said. "But technology allows us to embrace those things and to produce those types of degrees in a format and in a way that we never thought was possible."
Weatherford said boosting online education could help drive down the cost of a degree, dovetailing with Governor Rick Scott's push to lower tuition.