Abstract:

Recently, the diffusion of Internet and the adoption of virtual learning environments in institutions of Higher Education have undergone a great growth worldwide. As a consequence of this progress of virtual environments at universities, there are many theoretical and empirical studies focused on analyzing whether the website design 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 in the classroom. In this sense, despite the disparate abilities of college students, fortunately, there is evidence that learning process can be improved in a relatively short time through appropriate instruction. Targeted satisfaction interventions have resulted in substantial gains in test scores, also have improved student academic performance in courses and furthermore, this learning process has increased satisfaction of students at universities.

Satisfaction, happiness and well-being in the classroom have become necessary in Higher Education. However, definitions and measurements of some concepts are difficult to get. For this reason, it is important to develop conceptual and empirical frameworks describing those constructs in the classroom and taking a generic starting point, 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. 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 was conducted at universities in Mexico, Portugal and Chile between February and March 2016, within the framework of an international research of teaching innovation supported by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. The total number of students in this experiment was 543 and the ultimate aim of this work is to assess the impact of different combinations of website designs on happiness in the classroom, considering some personal characteristics as the gender of the students.

The outline of this paper is the following. First, a review of the literature on approaches to teaching, website design and happiness in the classroom is conducted. Second, a simple, systematic instrument to describe the behavior of the professor and a methodological procedure of research are 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 appearance, usability, happiness, classroom, Higher Education.