EVALUATING WEBSITE APPEARANCE AND USABILITY EFFECTS ON HAPPINESS IN THE CLASSROOM: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS IN THREE COUNTRIES

In the last decade, the diffusion of the 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 the personal characteristics of the students are the most influential factors on their satisfaction. However, it is important to distinguish the impact of these factors in order to improve the student satisfaction and happiness in the classroom. In this sense, despite the disparate abilities of students, 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 they 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 describe. For this reason, it is important to develop conceptual and empirical frameworks describing those constructs in the classroom under a generic starting point, based on the existing pedagogical and business literature. 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 Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile. In this research we develop a questionnaire for measuring and evaluating website appearance and usability on happiness in educational contexts. 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 main contribution of this paper is to show the usefulness of these results in several groups of students with very similar academic and professional circumstances worldwide.