Consumer Research and Beyond

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...

Hello! As it was planned, we conducted the survey, which you might have seen in one of our previous posts. In total, we got 80 responses and we thank all who took part in the it! Firstly, let's see the descriptive statistics for demographics: the average age of respondent is 23, 75% of all people who participated are Masters and 25% are Bachelors. For some reason, we got 72% of women and only 28% of men. I guess women are more responsive :) Most people took up 1-5 coursers in their, but there are many of those who had 6-8...

Now it is time to talk about the netnographic part of our study. In order to conduct this part of our study, we have chosen to monitor the comments and reviews across different MOOC platforms in order to find what customers seek when they go through an online course. In order to have consistency in our measurement, we have decided to focus our study on courses that teach introductory level programming in the Python programming language. We have chosen these courses because they are prevalent across all platforms and because they are aimed toward beginner programmers...

Hello! While we are finalizing the post devoted to our qualitative part of the study, we are kindly asking you to participate in our survey. Here is the link: https://goo.gl/forms/uTkwQFznXEDKyICi2 Huge thanks to all of you in advance!

Hi! We want to share with you this report - Class Central Learner Survey (2017): MOOC Users Highly Educated, Have Experienced Career Benefits. It has very interesting statistics about the users of MOOCs. What can we learn? ✔ You can study old or young - the age distribution of users is almost uniformal - 13-19% of people in each age category from 10 to 66. ✔ Graduate college degree students are prevalent (45%). Then go 3-4 year college degree students (29%). ✔ 80% of people learn out of personal interest and only around 50% of respondents also checked "for current career" and "new career"...

Hello! Couple of days ago you provided us with your feedback. Thanks to all who gave comments! It was really useful and we took into account important things that you mentioned. We had to make some amendments: after all, ignoring comments and being blind to criticism is a straight way to failure. Firstly, we decided to swap the stages of research. Instead of having QUANT → qual study, we will have qual → QUANT study. The reason for that is simple: preliminary qualitative study will help us identify the areas that we missed and get deeper insight into consumer world. Conducting netnographic...

(edited) 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...

So let’s talk about market landscape. After all, there are lots of different platforms and technologies, and one can be easily confused with this vast range of possibilities. Basically, the market players can be categorized into several segments, each serving different needs of customers. Preschool and school education These platforms are aimed at preparation for standardized exams, such as for applying to schools or graduation exams. The largest platforms in the world are indian Byju’s, american Apex Learning and others...

Hello Everybody! Before we jump down the rabbit hole into the topic of online learning from a research point of view, I think it’s a good idea to take a minute to talk about my personal experience with online learning and ask oneself a question: what is online learning for me? Personally, the first things that come to my mind when I hear online learning are the various specialized web-services that are now widely popular: edX, Coursera, Lynda.com, Udemy, Khan Academy, iTunes U, and many others (sorry if I didn’t mention your favorite). However, I remember how some of these sites started out in the beginning, and they were much different than now...

Lots of interesting stuff is going on in the world! The pace of modern life shapes how people interact with the world, advanced technologies influence our decisions and, thus, consumer behavior is constantly changing. Making it even more interesting to research! One of the areas to explore is the phenomena of online learning and education. It seems that in the age of rapid information inflation, it is not enough to study in school/college/university. People are becoming eternal students, who are educating themselves with the help of vast variety of online platforms...

This blog serves as a platform for sharing the progress of the "Consumer Behavior and Advanced Research Methods" project, which is a part of the 2-year Master in Management program at Graduate School of Management. The first post is devoted to the people who are working on this project. Meet two brilliant young men: Dmitry Berestovoy Graduated from Saint Petersburg State University of Economics, has a major in marketing and brand management. Has a passion for marketing research and statistics, participant of several marketing-related projects...