Hello!
Finally, we are ready to tell you about final remarks and recommendations.
As you know, we used two methods in our research: netnography and survey.
The results of these two converged, allowing us to make conclusions for the whole study. We answered the research questions (RQ), initially stated in our post.
Results
RQ1 What things consumers pay attention to when choosing an online course?
Three main factors were identified:
1. Instructor of the course, his performance and personality.
2. Institution that provides the course and platform that hosts it.
3. Assignments and how work is evaluated throughout the course.
4. Reviews of our course attendants.
5. Clear structure and information about the course available.
RQ2 How do consumers choose between similar courses?
According to our results, the most important factors are platform and institution, however course appearance and structure is also important. However, there are limitations discussed later.
RQ3 How the consumer’ post-course experience correlate with factors influencing the choice?
As we said, our two studies converged, meaning that the factors of course evaluation (post-course experience) are similar to what people pay attention to when choosing the course.
RQ4 What factors influence their continuation of the course?
This question is closely related to factors influencing the initial choice, since people tend to drop the course if they do not like the instructor or course assignments.
Recommendations
1. Joint branding between platforms and institutions. Since people are paying so much attention to these two factors, platforms-hosters and institution-providers can achieve synergy by co-branding courses. For example, the advertisements that describe the course as a "joint venture" of edX & Microsoft.
2. Do pilot episodes before launching course to estimate course instructor performance. As we discussed, the instructor plays role both in course choice and its drop rate. To avoid launching courses that can fail and can't bring value for the company which organizes them, one can do pilot study and whether an instructor is good enough.
3. Add review section to all courses. People need something to refer to when making a choice - that is why it is important to have review section, which is not common feature for all platforms.
4. Pay attention to appearance of course page. Bit of obvious, but still, many people are "visual learners", they assess the world around them based on what they see, that is why it is worth paying attention to.
Limitations
As in any other research, there are some limitations resulting from the research design and scope:
1. Due to small sample acquired, the results may not represent the whole population.
2. The results may differ for other consumer segments (not represented in this study):
- people older than 30 years;
- people with education lower than Bachelor and higher than Master.
Further research directions
There is a plead of directions in which one can develop further studies. This area is very interesting! Here are just some of them:
- conducting an experiment with different combinations of course attributes (conjoint analysis);
- conducting a survey on the basis of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with SEM model as a result;
- exploration of other segments of online education – language courses, school education, etc.