Driving online course sales by leveraging teacher information

Purpose: Online learning is increasingly popular, and educational platforms provide a wealth of courses. Improving course sales is the key to promoting sustainable development of online course platforms. However, limited research has explored the marketing of online courses. We study how to drive online course sales by leveraging teacher information. Design/methodology/approach: We performed an empirical study. We collected data through a crawler and image recognition from Tencent classroom. Findings: Our results show that providing teacher information and profile images helps promote online course sales. However, detailed course descriptions weaken the positive impact of teachers' profile images on online course sales. Furthermore, our study shows an inverted U-shaped relationship between the intensity of smiling in teacher profile photos and online course sales, and teacher descriptions negatively moderate this relationship. Research limitations/implications: Our study contributes to the research on online course sales and extends the context of the research on smiling as well as the studies of visual and textual information. Practical implications: The results have practical implications for online course sellers and platforms. Originality/value: Existing scholarly efforts have explored online courses mainly from an education perspective. More research is needed to advance the understanding of online course sales. Our study advances research in the marketing of online courses.