A research on online course purchasing behavior and the factors affecting this behavior

With technological developments, people have had the opportunity to purchase various training and courses they need from online platforms. While many people were not aware of this opportunity in the past, many of the face-to-face trainings have been moved online due to the pandemic, and it is predicted that this situation has increased the online course purchases. In this context, the online course buying behavior of people and the factors affecting this behavior will be examined. The purpose of this research is to find an answer to the question of why students prefer online courses instead of face-to-face or distance education. For this purpose, the factors affecting students' buying online courses were determined and the relationship of these factors with the intention to purchase online courses was tested. The factors that can affect consumers' online course purchase intentions have been examined within the scope of the relevant literature. In this context, the subjects of "Consumer Purchasing Behavior", "Education and Online Education Concepts" and "Technology Acceptance Model" are examined in detail. In the quantitative part of the study, a questionnaire was created and a pilot study was conducted with selected students. Afterwards, the factors affecting the online course purchase intention were determined by using the survey data by 427 students. The relationship between the determined factors and purchasing behavior was determined by the regression analysis method. In the research, the effects of independent variables on each purchasing dimension were examined in four different models; And a separate model was established for measuring the effect of these independent variables on the dependent variable of "Intention to Purchase Online Courses". According to the statistical results, 52% of the change in the online course purchase intention variable is explained by the independent variables, and this high value indicates that the established model is a strong model. It was seen that ten of the fifteen hypotheses established were supported. According to the supported hypotheses, it was concluded that university students gave importance to the perceived ease of use factor in online course shopping, they paid attention to the safety factor, but did not give a significant value to the benefit factor.