Boston University,

Indiana State University, PhD Technology Management

Walden University, PhD Applied Management and Decision Sciences

Texas Tech U, PhD Technical Communications and Rhetoric

University of the Rockies, PychD Executive Coaching, Organizational Leadership.

For Further Research:
Carnegie Fdn's List of 282 US PhD Programs, in three classes (Humanities & Social Sciences, STEM, & Professional)
DegreeInfo Distance Learning is the oldest and largest distance learning community on the Web. Post a question there and you'll get great advice.
Wikipedia's Global List of DBA Programs. Which of these are online and part-time is not clear.
DegreeInfo has a partial list of 45 UK universities that offer research doctorates.
A 2006 comparison of some programs: Doctoral Studies by the Internet.
A comparison of doctoral costs for the EdD for for some of these.
USN&WR ranks 12,000 full-time schools and 270 full-time doctoral programs, but not online programs.
For the UK's 114 full-time universities, see the League Tables for rankings.
Australian-Universities.com has a ranking of 22 Australian universities, some with online programs.
OEDB ranks 44 US online schools, but their US list is not complete, and has no international schools.
GuidetoOnlineSchools ranks 25 online schools, and gives some NCES stats.
The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) compiles aggregate stats about US online schools.
See NCES's Postsecondary Institutions & Price of Attendance in the US, 2008 for some aggregate data.


Key Questions to Ask in Evaluating These Programs
If you are considering an online or part-time doctorate to advance your career as a foresight professional, answering the following questions will be helpful. Questions are followed by a list of programs to consider, in three categories.

1. Where Do You and Will You Primarily Work?
Where will you primarily use your foresight doctorate? The three main areas are Practice (applied research doctorate), Education (educational doctorate), or Academics (basic research doctorate). The older you are, the more likely it is that you’ll get a terminal degree to start or supplement work in either foresight Practice for a client (most common) or foresight Education, teaching for a school, university or company (second most common). Academic foresight (least common) is also very important to advancing and grounding the field, but is usually done via residency-based doctorates, and is mainly a young person’s game. Nevertheless, even doctorates for academic purposes can be done online by mid-career or older working professionals, particularly if you'd be satisfied using it to do basic research (as well as teaching) at a lower-tier university. FERN seeks to help students and educators doing doctoral work and instruction all three of these areas.

2. Who are your Primary Clients and Community?
What clients and community will you serve most with your degree? For foresight Practice (applied research), typical clients can be grouped into four main communities, Science and Technology, Business, Policy, and Society. The last is a catch-all for a range of client types. Some clients span several or all of these communities. Foresight Education and Academics (basic research) are small enough that they can be treated as their own unique communities.

3. What Foresight-Oriented Thesis Do You Wish to Do?
Think first of your primary clients and community when you develop your thesis. It should serve their needs as powerfully as possible, while also building on your unique skills and interests. For a serious foresight thesis, you will also want a foresight practitioner, educator, or academic on your thesis committee, preferably as the chair, your primary advisor and sponsor. This person or persons will be your mentor(s), shepherding your unique intellectual contributions to foresight practice, education, or academics. Having foresight faculty in the same department that offers the degree is ideal. They can usually be your thesis chair. Failing that, or in addition, having foresight faculty from any department at the university should allow them to be on your thesis committee.

4. Do You Want a Course-Intensive, Research, or Publication Doctorate?
Course-Intensive online and part-time doctorates are by far the most common. You have to take a number of courses leading up to your thesis. The University of Phoenix is an example of this type. Some courses will be valuable, but others may be a waste of time, relative to your particular needs and interests. These doctorates typically take 3-4 years full-time and 6-8 half-time. Research doctorates are less common, and are primarily seen in Europe, Australia and South Africa. You do your own independent education, research, and thesis work, under faculty supervision. Required courses are generally self-paced, not instructional. They are faster to complete, typically taking 2-3 years full-time and 4-6 half-time, and often cost substantially less. Like the self-paced classes in college, which many start but few complete, research doctorates are best for self-motivated people who know just what they want. Publication doctorates are the least common. If you’ve already published extensive peer-reviewed work, typically six articles or more, and are an established expert in a field, you can bundle these articles up, do a bit more work, and get doctoral credit in just 1 year full-time or 2 years half-time. For those seeking to advance their careers in foresight practice, education, or non-tenure-track academic research, the Research and, where applicable, Publication doctorates are excellent alternatives to the Course-Intensive doctorate.

5. Do you Want a Practitioner-Oriented or Academic-Oriented Doctorate?
This distinction is less clear today than in the past, but it still has some value. Practitioner-oriented doctorates, DBAs and EdD's are available through business schools and education departments vs. PhDs, or academic-oriented doctorates. The PhD stresses research over application, and the DBA and EdD industry application over research. The PhD is generally more rigorous than the DBA or EdD, but not always, and not at all institutions. You can teach at the university with both, and the DBA or EdD usually have less of a research component (e.g., a DBA thesis is aproximately 50K words, a PhD thesis 100K words), but not always. The DBA and EdD are weak for tenure-track academics, but academic prestige may not matter for those getting their doctorate for practice or educational purposes. The US Dept of Ed. and the National Science Foundation recognize the DBA and EdD as "equivalent" to the PhD, so the distinction is more about process and social perception than it is about techical use. A DBA or EdD from a good university will still open doors for teaching and greatly increase your expertise. If your primary motivation is to add original thought to a particular area of academic study, the PhD would be preferred. If your primary motivation is to add original thought to an area of professional practice, a professional degree (DBA, EdD, etc.) might be preferred, and would be easier to complete as well. In practice, most people and clients will never know the difference, so it is a personal choice.

6. How Much Accreditation and University Reputation Do You Need?
For accreditation, regional accreditation (RA) is, counterintuitively, preferable to national accreditation (NA). The Distance Education and Training Council (DETC), a national accreditation body for online universities, accepts lots of low-rank universities, so credits from DETC schools don't always transfer to RA schools. As a result, we do not list DETC accredited schools. For reputation, if you are seeking an Academic doctorate, pay the most attention to social rankings. For an Education doctorate, any RA school will be sufficient. For a Practice doctorate, any accredited institution is sufficient, but higher rankings have more social significance. If pursuing a doctorate outside your own country, school ranking is less important. Nevertheless, we still recommend avoiding the lowest third or quarter of accredited online programs in any country, by ranking. Reward institutional performance! Comprehensive online university rankings have yet to emerge, so you'll have to do this ranking work yourself. In general, an online doctorate from a school that also has a high-ranked, full-time residency-based university is ideal, if you can find one. Boston University is perhaps the only US example at present. At the same time, several mostly-online and part-time degree universities, like Nova Southestern, Regent, Walden, and Union, are increasingly gaining reputations for excellence. Some, like the University of Phoenix, have mixed quality reputations, so buyer beware. The University of Phoenix enrolled about 225,000 students in 2008, about ten times the number of most of the others on this list, which typically range from 10-30K students

7. How Important is In-Person Student-Teacher and Student-Student Contact?
If regular in-person contact is particularly important and/or motivating to you, a part-time, course-based university, like the University of Phoenix, should be high on your list. Such programs offer weekly physical classroom meetings. Such meetings may be optional, but you are still often expected to attend virtually at a particular time, or at least participate in classroom discussions online. The other end of the spectrum is an entirely online, research based doctorate, where you travel once or twice to meet your thesis chair in person, and do the rest all on your own. A third alternative, and for many a happy medium, is programs with a "low-residency" requirement, where students are expected to visit the university two weeks or less each year over the first one to three years, with the rest of the program done online. We suggest that one week of residency a year should be an expected part of every online doctorate. Low-residency programs require a extra work from the university, and a bit of scheduling and extra expense on the part of the student, so they are still only a minority of online doctorates. Nevertheless they are a great way to add socialization, networking, and motivation to any online program, whether course-intensive or research based.


Benefits to an Online or Part-Time Foresight Doctorate - Brief Summary
Below is a short list of reasons why you might want to do an online foresight doctorate. The third reason under teaching, the ability to start a foresight masters program, is a particularly useful for growing the global foresight community.

Professional

• More respect and better pay in the corporate world
• Professional skills around a particular topic of interest

Teaching
Finding, networking, and supporting more Category 1 and 2 programs above is a high-value strategy for the continued development of the global foresight community.

Usefulness and Limits of the Online Doctorate for University Teaching
As mentioned before, an online degree even from an accredited university may not grant you teaching access to a top research university, unless that university already has a foresight department or center (and few do). You'll have to bring something else to the table, like particular industry or professional experience, for such jobs. By contrast, accredited online degrees work quite well for adjunct positions in second and third-tier universities, community colleges, private colleges, technical colleges, etc. It is true that you will be less competitive (meaning you'll have to bring other things to the table) if you are applying for full-time or associate professor positions with these degrees, but that can be overcome if you have other skills in marketing, management, curriculum development, etc.

Proposed Ideal Online Foresight Doctorate Structure
One example of what we think would be very helpful for our profession would be an online foresight doctoral program with the following characteristics. Let's see if we can get one created within this decade:



Marketing Foresight Doctoral Programs
FERN should do our part to make sure the foresight community knows about these programs. Places to market the best of our Category I programs to are the over 2,000+ foresight master's students and alumni of the existing global programs. There is also the World Future Society, which has over 25,000 members. Our GlobalForesight.org has over 1,000 members, many of which who would be interested in this. Shaping Tomorrow's Foresight Network has over 1,400 members. The Association of Professional Futurists has over 400 members. The World Futures Studies Federation has roughly 300 members.