You could look into Kent State UXD, the master's program I teach for. We currently have about 140 students. We're completely online. While I am of course biased by my association with the university, here are what I see as our pro's and cons:
Pro's:
- We're very strong in user experience research, information architecture and content strategy. Our instructors include some of the best practitioners in the field, like Adam Polansky, Samantha Starmer, Hilary Marsh, Stacy Surla, and so on.
- The program has a strong focus on developing students' "UX brain" - that is, how to approach UX and business problems through top-down and bottom-up analysis, field research, application of design thinking, and tight collaboration with neighboring disciplines; e.g., product management, development, marketing, and sometimes even sales.
- We also teach our students essential real-world skills like project scoping and project management, and how to operate within agile / lean product development environments.
- Over half of our student body is already working in the field, so we have strong peer support as well. In short, we build flexible, pragmatic practitioners who know how to approach a problem space.
Cons:
- We are currently not very strong in detailed interaction design. We teach students how to create customer journey maps and personas, design workflows that are appropriate for the context of use, and wireframes / wireflows. But we are agnostic about which tools they use. This helps us avoid having to relearn and teach the latest tools as the field shifts from Visio to Omnigraffle to Sketch and so on. As a result, we don't have a strong focus on detailed interaction design for specific platforms.
- We've recently partnered with the Visual Communication Design school at Kent so we can offer more of a foundation in visual design, but it's fair to say that we've got some way to go before we can claim to provide a strong visual design foundation.
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