You might try entering in your search engine "barriers to online study for older students."

Start with Scholar, and follow the links to the links etc. Then use ERIC.

I have a couple of research publications in the area of educational equity in online learning that might be of interest. I talk about overlapping challenges.

Here are a couple that I pulled searching 'equity' + 'Julie Willems' in Google: 

http://www.leishman-associates.com.au/ascilite2011/downloads/papers/Willems-full.pdf

file:///C:/Users/jwillems/Downloads/272-1006-1-PB.pdf

Article The Equity Raw‐Score Matrix – a multi‐dimensional indicator ...

Thanks all  for your help.

Julie thank for these articles they will be a big help hopefully in the research project I'm doing. Will let you know when I am finished with the project. thanks.

Hello Cathrine,

I’ve researched this area of adult education, and previously taught wholly online cohorts of mature students. I’ve written a couple of book chapters relating to this topic, based around the Ultraversity project in England UK. You should be able to see links to them on my Research Gate page. Please contact me if I may be of further assistance.

Hi Marguerite, I am not in Newcastle anymore but in Brisbane doing cross-institutional studies at Griffith Uni. So I am unable to access the book in the library. Can you send me the book/article title, so I can see if they have it up here. Thanks

I have written a piece called 'so what could possibly be wrong with blended learning?' It's in a journal called E learning update;

hope this is helpful, best wishes, Merv Lebor

Have you got enough to draw on now Cathrine? I can send you a couple of papers I've done on the topic if you need some more.  

Hi John, I would appreciate any papers that you have for this topic. I have not been able to find much about the online education for mature age students as not much appears to have been published in this field or is not able to be accessed online yet. I was going to finish the research this semester for uni but have now deferred it until next year and will still need the material. So any is welcome for reference. Thank you for your offer and much appreciated. Cathrine

Please see this article that gives the perspective of the online students' expectations:

Article Instructional Strategies to Help Online Students Learn: Feed...

Best regards,

Debra