Abstract:

The growing interest of creative and experiential didactic projects in Higher Education institutions evidences that the characterization of their main dimensions is a very relevant research question, not only for staffs but also for professors performing in the classroom. However, despite this widespread presence of educational experiences in the syllabuses and academic programs worldwide, the conduct of professors in the classroom is very different among several institutions and regions.

From a comparative perspective, the analysis of the professors’ attitudes and motivations in the classroom according to the students’ opinions provides a relevant and interesting vision in order to facilitate this type of transformational teaching in the classroom. In particular, several authors have analyzed the relationship between satisfaction and happiness in the classroom grounded in empirical findings of Positive Psychology in face-to-face contexts, but studies are scarce on experiences in virtual universities.

This paper aims:
1) to characterize a set of domains related to professors’ behaviors providing positive emotions in the classroom;
2) to assess their main dimensions for success from a Spanish virtual university.

Firstly, this manuscript describes a review of this emotional approach in learning and teaching and secondly, a rigorous managerial process in the classroom is validated. Additionally, we applied several in-depth interviews to a diverse sample of students evaluating the behavior of their professors in the classroom. Our results and conclusions reinforce the importance to implement experiential academic projects in virtual universities and promote happiness and satisfaction to different levels of management in the classroom.

The outline of this research is as follows. The first section refers to the introduction and conceptual background to base this positive approach in the classroom. Moreover, we review the theoretical and empirical foundations on educational practices in order to promote happiness and satisfaction among students from a Higher Education institution. Secondly, a systematic process to measure satisfaction and happiness on students of a virtual university in Spain carried out and as a result, we present an integrative methodology to collect and analyze data. Thirdly, a parsimonious analysis of results and discussion of students’ perceptions is described and finally, we focused on the conclusions, contributions for professors and further research in Higher Education.

Keywords:

Teaching, happiness, classroom, Higher Education, virtual university.