Since I am not a teacher, I can only speak on what I have seen as a student. When I compare my process to my fellow classmates, I find an array of processes. When I ask about the success of their papers, one may say that they started early and have finished. Another may say that they plan to start the day that the paper is due. I find that I am in between the student who starts early and the student who waits until the last minute. I learned in the HMXP course offered here at Winthrop that it is not about how much time and effort you put into your work, but it is about the finished product. My HMXP professor told us that we should not expect to do better or worse than someone who spends twice as long writing, or someone who spends less time writing. A student could write a paper over the span of a week and I may still receive a better grade because my product is better. This is why I feel as if all practices are not equally effective. I feel as if it depends on the person doing the writing and what works best for them. I do have family members who are in school currently, and I notice that their writing process is different from my classmates. What I have noticed is that older people like to hand write their papers before typing them because they are not as comfortable with technology as me and my classmates are. I also notice that they write farther in advance in order to have a second opinion on their work, whether it be their husband or the professor. I would say that for the field of online teaching that this would mean that older students may need more direction when it comes to the use of the technology but they are more steadfast when it comes to the completion and quality of assignments.
teachingmswhite
teachingmswhite 
No offense, but I would warn you against generalizations in discussing older students (and not just because I am one). š I am nontraditional yet type all of my work, except for my prewriting outline. Some of my older students are indeed afraid of technology, but many of them are actually more proficient at using academic technologies than their younger classmates. The younger students I come across are usually comfortable with technology but are unfamiliar with more sophisticated technology that can be useful in a college environment. Every semester, for example, my college freshmen are amazed by Prezi when I use it, which I consider to be an older technology at this point. I would have assumed that they would all be familiar with it and even have produced some presentations through it, but typically they have not. It is quite the opposite of what i expected, in many cases.