Zur Anpassungsfähigkeit von Weiterbildungsanbietern in der Corona-Pandemie

The COVID‑19-pandemic has changed the context of action of continuing education providers in Germany in the short term, irrespective of their characteristics and attributes, and forced them to make prompt adjustments to their offerings. For researchers, such an exogenous shock offers the opportunity to investigate to what extent continuing education providers succeed in adapting to a fundamentally changed situation and which institution characteristics play a role in this process. In this paper, we examine the theoretically based assumptions that the initial situation of continuing education providers prior to the COVID‑19-pandemic with regard to the use of digital formats and media was a decisive factor for the short-term conversion of offerings during the pandemic and that commercial providers in particular were better able to adapt to the changed situation. Using wbmonitor data from 2019 and 2020, we test the hypotheses with dose-response and difference-in-differences (DiD) models. The results suggest exogenous factors that set limits on adaptation performance.