Online Education in HEIs in Bangladesh moderated by COVID-19: Modified UTAUT2

Abstract

The whole world, including Bangladesh is
brought to a standstill by the pandemic of COVID-19. The
HEIs in Bangladesh also struggled to react to this sudden
catastrophe; magnified by uncertainties. Compared to
public universities, the private universities of the country
managed to react the fastest and adopted sweeping changes
in a very short period of time, shifting traditional face-to
face course content/teaching to online content/teaching. The
shift to fully functional online teaching learning platform
was sudden and with minimum preparation. To investigate
the perception of the private university student community
in Bangladesh towards this new teaching-learning method,
this paper adopted the Unified Theory of Acceptance and
Use of Technology (UTAUT) model, focusing on
stakeholders’ behavioral intention, availability of the online
platform ad resources, prior experience, attitude towards
usage and most importantly the impact of COVID-19
pandemic. Additionally, the paper also discusses the issues
of social and cultural impact. It was found that all the
UTAUT attributes are positively correlated with the
Behavioral Intention, and which also positively correlate
with students’ Use Behavior in adopting online education.
The impact of unexpected, and unprecedented COVID-19
pandemic also significantly moderated their behavioral
intention towards accepting online education.