Abstract:

As a consequence of the recent progress of the discipline of Positive Psychology, positive evaluations of life satisfaction are linked to happiness and numerous studies have addressed overall satisfaction with life in certain domains, including learning and teaching. In this sense, happiness and well-being in the classroom become compulsory in Higher Education and several studies have raised questions about the relevance of these topics in an educational context.

In usual educational practice, there are many theoretical and empirical studies focused on analyzing whether the website usability or rather the personal characteristics of the students, are the most influential factors on their satisfaction. However, it is important to differentiate the impact of these factors in order to improve the student satisfaction and happiness in the classroom, based on the existing pedagogical and business literature.

This paper is not about student satisfaction in online learning but rather about happiness in the classroom and the utilization of commercial websites in Higher Education. Instrument development is an iterative process that requires continued efforts to ensure the psychometric soundness of the instrument when applied to various populations and settings. Hence, the re-evaluation of existing instruments is common. For this reason, more and better insights grounded in empirically based findings are essential in order to alert universities to the necessity of being open to the needs and opinions of students. The intention in this research is to provide relatively simple frameworks, drawing as far as possible on concepts couched in educational language. The conceptualization that we have developed is related to approaches to teaching, but so far draws mainly on the literature of what has come to be called student learning research.

In this paper, a wide spatial representation of cross-sectional nature will be conducted at universities in Mexico and Chile between May and September 2016, within the framework of an international research of teaching innovation supported by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. The ultimate aim of this work is to assess the impact of different combinations of website usability on happiness in the classroom, considering some personal characteristics of the students. This paper describes the basis, contents, objectives and achievements of the aforementioned research project during the 2016 academic year.

The outline of this paper is the following. First, a review of the literature on approaches to teaching, website usability and happiness in the classroom is conducted. Second, a simple, systematic instrument to measure these constructs is presented. Third, an overall analysis of the results is carried out. Fourth, the last section is devoted to the discussions, conclusions, implications and further research.

Keywords:

Website, usability, happiness, classroom, Higher Education.