Abstract:

Many changes have taken place in the field of Higher Education. It is well know that professional practice demands that future graduates design and market products, preserve the interests of their clients, take responsibilities in public administration or participate in politics. Literature review and the available research papers on this topic show that Universities must educate professionals to become social leaders, consultants, advisers, entrepreneurs; in short, people with the capacity to solve problems.

Recently, among the different types of competences which must be implemented at universities, transversal competences must be considered essential. That is, they represent a multifunctional package of knowledge, skills and attitudes which enable students to pursue individual objectives driven by aspirations, participate as an active citizen in society and obtain a useful job in the labor market.

As a result of the increasing importance of the discipline of Positive Psychology in several academic areas, 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.

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 in their satisfaction. The objective of this work is two-fold.

It concerns:
(1) to design a scale related to happiness in the classroom in Higher Education, as well as
(2) to differentiate the impact of those factors in order to improve the happiness in the classroom, based on the existing pedagogical and business literature.

In this paper, a wide spatial representation of cross-sectional nature has been conducted at universities in Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Chile. Within the framework of an international research of teaching innovation supported by the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso (PUCV, Chile), a questionnaire was carried out to collect data and a factorial design for evaluating the impact of different combinations of website usability on happiness in the classroom, considering some personal characteristics of the students. The total number of students in this research was 203 and the main results of this study allow to characterize those factors and quantify its relevance to different levels of performance in the classroom.

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:

Dimensions, Teaching, Happiness, Classroom, Higher Education.