Nontraditional students make up a majority of post-secondary online learners in the United States. The development of online learning modalities continues to grow and transform the educational landscape, providing expansive options and vastly improving student access to completing an undergraduate program. Unfortunately, with this growth, online…

The purpose of this study is to examine the perceptions of adult learners in a first-year seminar course at Columbia State Community College, located in middle Tennessee, to determine if the content of the course has an impact on the learners' adjustment to college. With the statewide initiative to reach a goal of 55% of the state's population…

Previous research has revealed how mature students are more likely to drop out of university education, achieve poorer degree outcomes and have greater family, financial, caring and work commitments to contend with than their younger peers. In response to calls for further empirical work on mature students' university experiences and informed…

On average, the college graduation rates for minority and/or high-need students are generally low. To address this situation, a Mid-Atlantic Consortium recently secured a grant to improve 4-year graduation rates of high=need students (i.e., new first-time students and transfer students who qualify as low-income students, first-generation college…

The global trend towards the expansion of student participation in higher education study has resulted in unprecedented challenges to the sector as it seeks to respond to greater diversity in the student body and increased demand for academic support and flexibility in entry pathways. Unsurprisingly, this trend has been accompanied by a…

This research draws on the experience of a group of mature students' studies during their first year at university. All experienced varying degrees of Imposter Syndrome, feelings of fraudulence and a lack of confidence in their ability. The process of "becoming" a mature student is one of identity change and risk. Gaining a sense of…

For more than two decades, the national standard for benchmarking student satisfaction in higher education has been the Ruffalo Noel Levitz Satisfaction-Priorities Surveys. Since their beginning in 1994, these benchmark surveys have been used by more than 2,900 U.S. colleges and universities to evaluate students' concerns that correspond with…

For the forty-fourth time, the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented online and onsite during the annual AECT Convention. Volume 1 contains papers dealing primarily with research and development topics. Papers dealing with…

This "Briefing" presents information about the initial tertiary education experiences, such as satisfaction with aspects of student life and changes to initial enrolments, of two groups of young people, based on two recent Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) research reports. One study focused on the first year experiences of…

The American Public University System (APUS) is currently attracting more than eight hundred new undergraduate students every month, the majority of whom are required to take "Foundations of Online Learning" as their first course. That first course plays a critical role in the academic career of new students and may have a direct bearing…