Virtual empathy as digital competence in education 3.0

The social and interactive dimension has taken on particular relevance with theappearance of new technologies in education, making the capacity for virtualempathy a key competence for promoting learning processes in virtual environments.Therefore, we conducted a study based on a survey with 704 students who weretraining as teachers, to whom we applied an adaptation of the empathy scale designedby Gorostiaga et al. (Revista de Educación 364, 12–38, 2014). The study shows a validand reliable measure of virtual empathy. Results indicate that only 10 % of the samplereached a high level of virtual empathy and, for this reason, we believe it should beincluded in teacher education syllabuses.