New literacies in today's digital society have concentrated much scientific-educational attention over the last decade (Area & Pessoa, 2012; Greene, Yu, & Copeland, 2014; Meyers, Erikson, & Small, 2013). The eruption of new technologies increasing the opportunities and contexts of learning have brought to the forefront of educational debate the social function and pedagogical model of educational institutions together with the role and competences of teachers themselves in these new scenarios.
The challenges currently facing education involve incorporating new pedagogical strategies in a more open and flexible formal education as several authors have recently pointed out (Castañeda & Adell, 2013; Cobo & Moravec, 2011; Coll & Engel, 2014; Tyner, Gutiérrez-Martín, & Torrego-González, 2015).
In this study, we propose studying the level of virtual empathy manifested by trainee teachers as a key digital competence in new pedagogies for Education 3.0 and how this relates to their social presence in virtual environments.
Education 3.0 and new pedagogies
The European digital agenda underlines the need for a change in the pedagogical model of educational institutions to meet the demands of the new knowledge society, pointing towards a greater flexibility and tailoring of learning which implies giving a greater role to new digital technologies in teaching-learning processes in formal contexts.
Several authors (Hussain, 2012; Poore, 2014) have reflected on the implications of the Web 3.0 for education, suggesting the possibility of accessing information in one global data repository as one of its most characteristic features. Although the web 2.0 meant a revolution due to the degree of interactivity and participation it has involved, it has also led to the generation of a large quantity of unorganized contents. The Web 3.0 means that this information may be systematized intelligently, opening up the possibility for its use and conversion into useful knowledge (Ramírez-Leon & Peña-Alcira, 2011). One of the great contributions of the Web 3.0 is the ubiquitous access to learning resources through mobile devices, which enable access to any content, at any time and virtually anywhere.
In his reflection on online pedagogy, Weller (2009) highlights that features of the Web 3.0, such as user-generated content, data generated on an incommensurate scale, the network being sustained on an architecture of participation, have meant that new pedagogies are being explored, or at least interest has been shown towards them.
Several studies (Anderson, 2010; Castañeda & Adell, 2013; Wheeler, 2015) have looked into online pedagogies, finding that they all share a vision of the learner as an active person who is capable of deciding what, how, when, where and with whom they learn, which is the core of the educational process. They take a wide-ranging and dynamic view of learning as a process covering different contexts of activity, which provide opportunities and resources for learning. All these theories (connectivism, rhizomatic learning, self-regulated learning, etc.) are proposed as a response to the need to re-think education as a more open and flexible formal education.
The digital competences of teachers
One of the key factors for educational innovation and improvement is the training of teachers in ICT as highlighted by a number of international reports (OCDE, 2014). The EU's DIGCOMP project (Ferrari, 2013) establishes five areas of digital competence, amongst which it identifies the ability to communicate in digital settings, collaborate with other people and share resources using online tools. In turn, Area and Pessoa (2012) also identify five areas of competence, amongst which they do not just contemplate skills to express oneself through different languages and be able to communicate and collaborate with other people using technologies, but also include skills of expression and emotional regulation regarding ICTs as a crucial facet. Janssen et al. (2013) also identify several areas of digital competence, including the capacity to collaborate and communicate mediated by technology and learn about and with technologies to improve self-efficacy and decision-making. All these studies agree that one of the most important skills in these new settings is linked to protection and security on the net.
Some recent research has looked into the digital competence of teachers. In their study with non-university teachers, Cortina-Pérez, Gallardo-Vigil, Jiménez-Jiménez, and Trujillo-Torres (2014) found that more than 60 % of teachers made no use of Web 2.0 tools in their teaching work and, despite over 90 % of them having received ICT training, more than 70 % felt they were not prepared to make educational use of these technologies. In a recent study, again with non-university teachers, García-Pérez, Rebollo-Catalán, and García-Pérez (2016) showed that they have a moderate level of digital competence in the use of virtual social networks, but their digital competence for teaching is less developed.
This assessment is also repeated at university level, where San Nicolás, Fariña, and Area (2012) also found that, although lecturers have adequate ICT proficiency, they hardly use the Web 2.0 (social networks, debating forums and blogs). Marcelo, Yot, and Mayor (2015) obtained very similar results in the use university teachers make of the social networks as a means of teaching-learning, finding that they hardly ever use these media to distribute news, information and the latest developments.
However, although all these studies present global results about teachers' digital competences, few look specifically into emotional skills and even fewer into empathy in this area.
Virtual empathy as a digital competence
Empathy has been studied before in education, and there is a whole body of knowledge about the effects of empathy on educational processes. The most recent research about teacher effectiveness shows that empathic teachers do not just tend to create more secure and motivating environments and establish positive relations with their students, but also their empathy has positive effects on student performance (Goroshit & Hen, 2014).
Fernández-Pinto, López-Pérez, and Márquez (2008) argue that empathy needs to be seen as a multidimensional skill involving cognitive, emotional and situational aspects. In a previous study, Martínez-Otero Pérez (2011) found gender differences in the balanced presence of the affective (empathic stress and empathic joy) and cognitive dimension (adoption of perspective and emotional understanding) of empathy in trainee teachers. The study found that men find it easier to recognize and understand other people's emotional states rather than involve themselves in other's affective situations; meanwhile women demonstrate the ability to share emotions besides identifying and understanding other people's state of mind.
In turn, research into digital literacy (Eshet-Alkalai, 2004; Ala-Mutka, 2011; Area & Pessoa, 2012) has demonstrated the importance of including emotional skills in the study of digital competence. Ala-Mutka (2010, 2011) considers the emotional dimension as one of the key factors on the conceptual map of digital competence for the 21st Century, including it as part of intercultural communication and collaboration made possible by new virtual spaces for informal learning on social networks. Eshet-Alkalai (2004) also includes the socio-emotional dimension among the components of digital literacy, pointing out that this is the most difficult facet to develop because it includes cognitive (empathic understanding) and metacognitive (adoption of the other's perspective) aspects together with affective ones. For that reason, it has been one of the least evaluated aspects, to the extent that we do not have specific tools to measure it.
Some previous studies have analyzed the emotional dimension as a key element of learning in virtual surroundings. Based on the theory of Garrison and Anderson (2003), which included the affective dimension as a facet of social presence in virtual learning settings, a series of studies have analyzed didactic and social presence in educational processes in virtual surroundings (Marcelo & Perera, 2007; Santos-Acevedo, 2011; Kim, 2011; Vega-Caro & Buzón-García, 2016). They focused particularly on the expression of positive emotions, which strengthen affective bonds in a learning community. We also found studies analyzing the quality of relations and the cohesion of virtual communities, including affective aspects (Rebollo-Catalán, García-Pérez, & Sánchez-Franco, 2013).
However, we find that while empathy is a skill, which has been widely studied in education, it has not been featured specifically in the study of educational processes created by new virtual environments. For that reason, this study intends to analyze the empathy shown by trainee teachers in open virtual surroundings, which foster informal learning by adapting a measure, which has proved effective in the study of empathy in face-to-face education.
In their review of measures of empathy, López-Pérez, Fernández-Pinto, and Abad (2008) maintain that Cognitive and Affective Empathy Scale (CAES) is valid and reliable for measuring empathy because of the amount of knowledge tested on previous studies about its structure and intercultural meaning. Drawing on the previous study of Gorostiaga, Balluerka, and Soroa (2014) in which they adapted and validated this measure, a secondary, but no less important, objective of our study was to adapt and validate the CAES for measuring empathy in open virtual environments, which favor learning.