The problem that was addressed through this study is that online undergraduate adult students, 25 years of age or older, do not persist to graduation at Caring University, a pseudonym for an online university. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the perceptions of online adult undergraduate alumni about what motivated them to…

Remote learning was a key component of college strategies for addressing the COVID-19 crisis across the country. While many colleges already supported online delivery, others migrated course content to remote platforms for the first time. According to Holin IQ, the last half of 2020 saw the second largest amount of spending on information…

Dating back to 1998, researchers established that adults learn differently than younger, recent high school graduates. Even with decades of research on the topic, approximately 39 million American adults have attended college but left school without obtaining a degree. The research questions addressed the purpose of this qualitative exploratory…

This essay addresses the transformation of Korean higher education (HE) that has occurred since COVID-19, with a focus on the digitization of teaching and learning. Digitization has impacted both remote and traditional universities and colleges. While remote higher education institutions (HEIs) have been quick responding to the changed situation,…

Grit and mindset are two of the hottest topics in education today, but research on their predictive power for academic success is inconclusive and rife with gaps and limitations. The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationships between grit, mindset, self-regulated learning (SRL), and academic outcomes for adult students attending…

Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) at all-online universities are faced with the same challenge each year: creating a professional development curriculum that offers experienced and pedagogical support and community-building opportunities for faculty. Ideally, faculty would offer suggestions, contributions, and engagement regarding their…

This study examines how the self-reported cheating behaviors of students from a single large institution serving primarily adult students in online courses differ from those previously reported in large-scale studies of academic integrity among traditional-age college students. Specifically, the research presented here demonstrates that students…

Many students who enroll in online universities will never graduate. Attrition in higher education is accepted and expected; however, in exclusively online programs, it is prolific, with more than 80% of those students who begin an online program leaving before graduating. It is well known in the academic literature that isolation is related to…

The emergence of remote and for-profit universities has provided increased opportunities for adult learners to obtain higher education degrees in a technologically-dependent teaching-learning environment. During the pandemic, for-profit online learning institutions experienced increases in enrollment while face-to-face institutions experienced a…

Fostering learner agency is a primary goal of Integrative Computer Assisted Language Learning, a type of CALL (Warschauer, 1996) that encompasses networked learning and multimedia, including hypermedia. Although navigation has been a focus of attention in some more established CALL scenarios such as Intelligent Computer Assisted Language learning…

The purpose of study was to examine the student support services for non-traditional adult students. The study provided insight into the lived experiences of these students while enrolled at Union Institute & University's (UI&U) bachelor's degree program. The study also examined the effectiveness of the Pay It Forward Mentoring (PIFM)…

In July 2014, the U.S. Department of Education announced a new round of experimental sites focusing on competency-based education. Capella University was selected to participate in three of the Department of Education's competency-based education (CBE) experiments and began by implementing the prior learning assessment experiment, which allows…

Few empirical studies of adult distance learners' decisions to drop out of degree programs have used large enough sample sizes to generalize the findings or data sets drawn from multiple online programs that address various subjects. Accordingly, in this study, we used a large administrative data set drawn from multiple online degree programs to…

Western Governors University Texas (WGU Texas), where the author is chancellor, is not an easy institution to describe. It just does not fit the profile of most traditional universities, even the newer for-profit and online ones. It brings the work of a national, online, nonprofit university into a state, and it embraces a competency-based…

This qualitative case study examined the life impact of earning an online Bachelor's degree as an adult from a large private East Coast research university. As the number of adult students and the popularity of online learning continue to increase, there is a need for improved understanding of the value of online degree programs for adult…