Nontraditional students continue to attend courses in an online environment and struggle to complete their first academic year by experiencing lower retention and graduation rates. Online education offers nontraditional students the opportunity to engage in higher education while balancing work and home life and educational institutions are increasing the number of online courses to accommodate this need. The specific problem is that nontraditional students attend online courses for flexibility but experience low retention rates and research is lacking to identify predictors and strategies to assist this student population. The purpose of this Delphi study is to build a level of consensus from a national panel of educational experts on best practices to improve the retention rate of nontraditional online students. The expert panel consisted of educational experts from 15 different educational institutions that had over 5 years' experience with nontraditional students and currently held positions within a higher educational institution that offered either online courses or programs. 27 educational experts participated in this study to identify 46 best practices found within four developed themes. The four themes that were developed were: (1) student and faculty, (2) faculty engagement, (3) technology and course design, and (4) higher education institutions overall. The top eight best practices were expanded upon for practitioner and leadership recommendations to assist educational institutions with increasing nontraditional online student retention. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://www.proquest.com/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]