Abstract:
This research is conducted based on the presence of a phenomenon or trend of
increasing usage of paid online course services, which has occurred massively across
all sectors of society in Indonesia since the COVID-19 pandemic. During that time,
many learning and teaching activities conducted by teachers and student had to be
carried out online through distance learning throughout the pandemic. Additionally,
employees and professionals have also been using paid online course services due to
the high number of job terminations, prompting them to seek ways to obtain new
employment by learning new knowledge and skills. Based on this phenomenon, there
appear to be four factors underlying the formation of the intention to use paid online
course services: perceived critical mass, trust, competition, and price sensitivity. This
study employs a quantitative research approach with 327 purposively sampled
respondents who have utilized paid online course services, and the data is processed
using IBM SPSS Statistics. The findings indicate that perceived critical mass has a
significantly negative relationship with the intention to use paid online courses, while
trust and competition have significantly positive relationships. However, price
sensitivity does not show a significant relationship with the intention to use paid online
courses. And based on the findings of this study, it can provide insights to paid online
course service providers to increase the penetration rate of the usage of paid online
course services by considering the factors behind an individual's intention to use paid
online course services.
