Understanding Barriers and Motivations of Non-Traditional Students Learning Programming in an Online CS1 Course

Due to the increasing number of computing jobs and national demands, we are seeing a surge of non-traditional students (aged over 25), entering the online CS1 courses. We are at a large metropolitan public research university, where 30% of the students are non-traditional students. However, the online CS1 course usually consists of 70-75% of non-traditional students. We carried out a study in that course for the last 5 semesters where we interviewed non-traditional students to better understand their characteristics and how those are related to their learning goals and performance. This paper is an attempt to identify the unique characteristics of non-traditional students that can help Computing-ED researchers and admins to design online CS1 courses with appropriate pedagogy, so a better learning experience can be provided to them and their retention rates can be increased