In their own words, from their own perspective: adult students’ experiences in online higher education

The rapid development of online distance programmes has increased the popularity of higher education among adult students. However, despite the suggested benefits of online higher education (OHE), it has been well documented that adults may experience various challenges and barriers when adapting to it. Prior research on adult students’ experiences has tended to be influenced by psychological theories and predominantly represented by survey-based studies focused on individual factors or groups of factors that affect adults’ learning. As a result, inadequate attention is given to adult students’ voices within the online learning context. This article reports the results of the study that examined qualitatively different ways of experiencing online learning by adult students. A detailed picture of these variations was drawn from interviews with adult students from two online postgraduate programmes in the UK and Russia. The chosen phenomenographic research design assists in uncovering qualitative variations in adult students’ accounts and leading to a development of a hierarchically structured model. The analysis demonstrated three ways of experiencing online learning: as an investment, as a process that brings structure, and as a process that enables and empowers. The context in which online learning is conceptualised is proposed to explain the identified variations.