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The goal of our research is to define factors influencing the choice of online course.
There are lots of different courses on a plead of subjects. One can search for them on a single platform or on several of them. People can look for a particular subject, but also browsing and deciding on-the-go.
As a consumer enters this sea of knowledge, he or she has to choose what to study. Since there is always limited time available, often the choice is narrowed to just couple of courses, and the decision is determined by some factors. That is what our research is about.
In our previous post we discovered that the market of online education consists of several segments. We are interested in the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC), because this is where consumer has maximum freedom of choice.
The research questions (RQ) are:
RQ1 What things consumers pay attention to when choosing an online course?
RQ2 How do consumers choose between similar courses?
RQ3 How the consumer’ post-course experience correlate with factors influencing the choice?
RQ4 What factors influence their continuation of the course?
To answer these questions, we decided to implement mixed research design.
First, we will develop a questionnaire and perform quantitative study revealing factors influencing consumers’ choice.
Then, we will carry out qualitative study - netnography, in order to understand how the factors identified in the first study correlate with reviews that people leave for online courses.
So, this is a sequential research design - QUANT → qual. The first part is dominant and the second one is supportive.