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.