The article examines the phenomenon of online education, which is very actively spreading in foreign and domestic education systems, but requiring monitoring of this process. The problems of online education are analyzed according to the assessments of domestic and foreign authors, including the materials of annual conferences held by the Sloan Consortium Corporation (now Online Learning Consortium (OLC)). The data of a sociological study of the motivation and readiness of online education actors at a regional university using the methodology of nonparametric statistics are presented. The cluster analysis, carried out by the K-means method, made it possible to obtain an empirical typology of tutors and students of Dubna State University and identify target groups among university members of faculty as online course developers and among university students as consumers of an online educational product. A comprehensive analysis of the theoretical and empirical blocks made it possible to identify trends in the development of online education, problem areas associated not only with the economic component, but also with motivational reinforcement, which can be considered among the factors of managerial decision-making by the university administration.