Correctly identifying the role of students is important for education providers to serve high-quality education. This paper presents a novel notion of value co-creator for describing the role of older learners in older adult education (OAE) from both theoretical and practical perspectives. Theoretically, we propose eight foundational premises and analyse their rationale of perceiving older learner as value co-creator from service science perspective. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive survey of four Chinese OAE universities. The findings learned from the survey validate the proposed foundational premises and the perception of learner as value co-creator. Identification of the value co-creator role of older learners would improve the quality of education services and achieve their maximal values by effectively collaborating with older learners.