Having had the experience of being both a traditional aged an a non-traditional aged student before I finished my undergraduate education, the qualitative difference between those experiences was that when I was older, I tended to treat my classes as a starting point, not as a step toward a grade.

That attitude was more common among my cohort in graduate school, and it's very common in those MOOC's which achieve an active learning community (i.e. courses that are not self paced self study).