The Generational Digital Gap within Dual Vocational Education and Training Teachers

In our current society, Digital Competence is an essential and basic competence for teachers. The students need trained teachers who know how to use Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and develop them into pedagogy. However, some of them do not know how. This phenomena is called “The generational digital divide”, which occurs when teachers do not have sufficient digital or technological skills or do not adapt to them. This article aims to determine whether the age of teachers has an influence on their knowledge about Information and Communication Technologies. The objective is to detect if there really exists a digital gap between generations, specifically in Dual Vocational Education Training, a kind of education which has been growing in the recent years. To do so, a study with a quantitative and descriptive method has been carried out, with the participation of 1.568 teachers of this training modality in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. The data were extracted by means of a questionnaire to measure the level of digital teaching competence in Dual Vocational Education and Training schools. The results showed that the level of digital competence shown was medium to low across all dimensions. With regard to the age factor, only the problem-solving dimension was found to be age-dependent.


Introduction
So far in this century, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have revolutionized social, professional, educational and communicational relations; turning society, according to Cabero and Llorente (2006), into a more dynamic and interconnected group of individuals that demands new skills from its citizens and trainers.
The European Parliament in its "Recommendation on Key Competences of Lifelong Learning" (European Commission, 2006) established the term "Digital Competence", which is defined as "the creative, critical and safe use of information and communication to achieve objectives related to work, employability, learning, leisure, inclusion and social participation". Such competence is essential in all areas of work. Having a good level of ICTs knowledge is necessary to access any qualified job with greater possibilities, otherwise there is a risk of unemployment and a difficult work insertion.
In this sense, the intervention of the education system is essential to acquire these skills. In fact, teachers should be the ones who transmit these skills at all levels of education. That is the reason why they should feel comfortable in the use of new technologies (Suarez-Rodriguez et al., 2012).
To achieve this objective, an initial and permanent training of suitable teachers is essential to achieve Digital Skills, which would help them to alleviate that feeling of "instability and ignorance" that many possess (Julian, & Martin-Diaz, 2014). Thus, in 2005 the OECD established that key knowledge in digital competences are important to teacher training. In Spain, with the reformulation of the teaching training plans of the Ley Organica para le mejora de la calidad educativa (LOMCE) (2013) emerged the Europe 2020 Strategy, which indicated the need to acquire the necessary knowledge to provide quality education in areas such as diversity , mastering of languages, continuous education and integration of ICTs (Morales Capilla et al., 2015).
Currently, the various pieces of legislation consider the Digital Teaching Competence to be crucial for the development of teacher activity, and it is also considered cross-cutting in all areas of the curriculum. Diez (2012) considers essential that new teachers finish their studies with a high level of ICTs skills, which according to Cabero and Llorente (2008) should not be taught as mere instrumental actions, but rather to help them jump right into the Information Society to the Knowledge Society.
To do this, a quality training is needed so teachers can integrate the technology in their pedagogical methodology. Such training should be based on data assessment, collaboration with the educational community through digital technologies, content development, evaluation, programming, data protection, and ICTs knowledge (Amhag et al., 2019;Rodriguez-Canfranc, 2019).
Thus, the Spanish National Institute of Educational Technologies and Teacher Training (Instituto Nacional de Tecnologias Educativas y Formacion del Profesorado [INTEF]), which belongs to the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training, is the one responsible for the integration of ICTs and teacher training in the non-university educational stages. This agency proposed in 2017 within the "Digital Teaching Framework" five areas or dimensions that make up the Digital Competence of Teachers (Table 1). Having this knowledge, as indicated by institutions such as the European Commission, the World Bank or the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), is a strategic requirement for the economic and social development of any country.

Literature Review
The Digital Teaching Competence is not only about mastering technology, but also it needs to establish how to apply to its pedagogy. For this reason, many authors differentiate between technological and pedagogical competences (Law, & Chow, 2008;Suarez et al., 2010). The former are linked to the knowledge and skills of teachers in ICTs, while pedagogical competences are based on skills and knowledge on how to use digital resources in curriculum design and development, and on the planning and execution of educational practice.
In short, the teacher must know the technological resources and simultaneously use them in his daily teaching task. ICTs make the teaching process adapt to the personal characteristics of each student and their learning style, which involves moving from the culture of teaching to the culture of learning, which is characterized in that the student acquires the knowledge by actively building them (Cabero, 2006).
In this sense, in these recent years there have been multiple researches that have studied the self-assessed Digital Competence in the educational field, in different contexts and levels (Belichenko et al., 2017;Edelhard, 2015;Fernandez Batanero et al., 2017;Fernandez, & Torres, 2015;Garzon et al., 2020;Heads et al., 2014;Rambousek et al., 2016;Sanchez Prieto et al., 2020). It is clear from these studies that even if the availability of technological resources in the schools increases, teachers do not apply to their pedagogical practice the necessary use of ICTs, which leads to a stagnant traditional education (Area, 2010). They also show that, in Spain, a significant number of teachers require training, especially methodologically speaking.
This article reflects how age influences the digital knowledge of teachers, also known as "Generational gap". Prensky (2001) coined the terms "digital natives" and "technological immigrants". The first are people born in the "era" of computers, while later are the most senior teachers (Monereo & Pozo, 2008). Although there are still many teachers considered as "immigrants", newly graduated teachers are already digital natives.
Digital natives are the generation born between 1980 and 1994 that grew and are familiar with ICTs (Oblinger, & Oblinger, 2006). They integrated into society with different learning preferences (Jukes et al., 2010) and designed their subjects thinking about leveraging the Network and generating a formative continuum that goes beyond the virtual classroom (Belichenko et al., 2017;Duart, 2010).
On the other hand, technological immigrants only use the Internet as a place where the documents of the subject are located or a way to replace the hours of tutoring of students in the office (Duart, 2010). These teachers have difficulty in acquiring ICTs knowledge, which develops a concern on how to address the challenges posed by the latest technological innovations (Garrido et al., 2016), developing a kind of "technophobia" or rejection to new technologies and refusing to include them in their classroom without being aware of their importance (Hervas et al., 2016).
Because of these differences, age is an influential factor in the use of ICTs in teaching. In addition, there are several studies (Sigales et al., 2008) that indicate that as the age of the teacher increases, the level of ICTs skills decreases (Hermino, & Arifin, 2020).
The age variable has been studied by many researchers with favourable results to younger generations. According to Fernandez-Cruz and Fernandez-Diaz (2016), the older teachers (56-66 years), have a much lower ICTs teacher training profile than those teachers who are younger, and teachers between 20 and 25 years of age the ones who achieve the best digital profile. Another example that supports this idea is the research carried out by Garcia et al. (2014) with the aim of identifying the levels of digital competence by surveying 2,143 students of Early Childhood Education, Primary, Secondary and Baccalaureate, where the good predisposition to the use of ICTs was proven because it is a sample of digital natives. Another example is the study carried out by Martos et al. (2016), through a sample of 207 music teachers of the Secondary Education, with the aim of knowing if there was a relationship between the age of teachers and the development of the Andalusian program School ICT 2.0., which concluded that depending on the age of the teacher in question, it is also more reluctant to incorporate new technologies into the classroom.
In contrast, these differences are not detected in other investigations. Examples include the study carried out by Hernandez Ramos and Torrijos Fincias (2018) where the age of the teacher does not appear to be decisive in determining the level of integration of ICTs into their teaching, although it should be taken into account that in the group surveyed (university teachers), older teachers tend to have a degree of greater stability and, therefore, they are more prone to the realization of innovations that facilitate the integration of ICTs to their teaching methods. On the other hand, it is also important to mention the article by Fernandez Batanero and Torres Gonzalez (2015) carried out by teachers on the Education of Adults in Andalusia to observe the use and integration of ICTs, in which there are no significant differences in the age variable, although the huge commitment of this kind of teachers to their work and their recognition of ICTs is highlighted.
These factors may indicate that the real variable is not the age, but of the training deficit of the type of teachers being studied, or the inequality of many schools to recycle the Digital Competence effectively for teaching (Sainz, 2013).
In any case, multiple studies make a reflection on teacher training, due to the need of a greater training for the real integration of ICTs into the classrooms, in order to reduce the presumed generational digital divide.
The main objective of this article is to detect these alleged differences of Generational Digital Competence with the data provided by a study carried out between teachers of "Dual Vocational Education and Training" in the Autonomous Community of Andalusia. Dual Training is a mode of teaching that is carried out simultaneously in two different places: the educational center and the real company, two places that are complemented by coordinated activities. It is not simply based on internships in a company to put into practice what is learned in the school, but rather requires that the teaching-learning process is carried out both in the classroom, where the theoretical knowledge is acquired, and in the company, where the students can assimilate the practical concepts (Nowak, 2019;Molina, 2016 Dual Vocational Education and Training is a system where the application of ICTs in the learning teaching process becomes even more necessary, since the essential collaboration between tutors in the study and in the work center the students. Therefore, digital skills should not only be possessed by the teachers in schools, but also by the trainers in the companies (Sanchez Prieto et al., 2020).
Due to the scarcity of research carried out on digital skills in Dual Education and Training and because it has experienced a great expansion in the recent years, it is intended to detect its training needs in digital pedagogy and to see whether the digital gap between teachers really exists in this area.

Research Goal
The acquisition of an optimal level of digital competence has become an increasingly indispensable requirement for teachers, in order to respond to the new demands requested by the current society and the education system. Similarly, and based on the specialized literature referred to above, age has been an influential factor in the development of digital competence of teachers of several educational stages.
As a result of these ideas, the objective of this work is to detect the level of digital competence of Dual Vocational Education and Training Teachers and to check whether age is a determining factor in presenting greater or less digital skill.

Methodology
A quantitative cross-sectional study (Hernandez et al., 2016) is presented. The intention is to describe by means of descriptive and inferential statistical evidence the situation of education in relation to the digital knowledge of Dual Vocational Education and Training teachers. Similarly, through techniques and regression modeling, it is intended to find out whether age is a predictor of the development of this competition.

Sample and Data Collection
A total of 1,568 dual-trained teachers from the Autonomous Community of Andalusia participated in the study. The sampling technique employed was through convenience sampling. The questionnaire was distributed through the digital platforms on repeated occasions to all the centres in Andalusia, obtaining this number of responses. According to its main characteristics, the average age of the study sample was 33, being the older a 49 years old and the youngest 18. In terms of gender, there were 745 women and 823 men.

Instrument
To achieve the investigation, an ad hoc questionnaire based on the five areas of e-skills proposed by INTEF was set up. In addition, a sixth area linked to the technology tooling domain was added. Therefore, the European Framework for Digital Skills for Citizens (DigComp) (Fernandez et al., 2013) was taken as a reference for its configuration.
The independent variables (features) were the age (Age) and the years of work experience (Exper); the dependent variables were based on the areas of knowledge raised by INTEF.
• IDL (Degree of Information and Digital Literacy) • LCCD (Level of communication and collaboration of digital resources) • ACD (Ability to create digital content) • DT (Knowledge of digital tools) • CS (Knowledge in computer security) • PS (Problem-solving capability) The study has been carried out with the following variables. The initial data frame consisted of 68 columns and 1,568 observations and participating subjects, teachers of professional training of a dual nature. The qualitative variables were then factored: • Professional family to which they belong (B.Know) (Others=0; Administration and management=1; Commerce and Marketing=2; Languages=3) The questionnaire was subject to a process of content validation by experts, which were lecturers from different Spanish universities (University of Seville, University of Malaga and University of Granada). The measure of Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin for the adequacy of the sampling (KMO=.741) and the Barlett's Test of Sphericity (χ² = 984.143; p-value = .000) was applied.
Finally, regarding the internal consistency of the instrument, the Cronbach's Alpha test was applied, which obtained a result of α= .877, an optimal value to guarantee the viability of the research.

Analyzing of Data
For the analysis of the data the statistical package lmtest of the statistical software Rstudio in its version 3.6.1 was used. First, the common descriptive statistics were applied, which allowed us to approach the description of the perceptions of teachers of Dual Vocational Education and Training.
Two atypical values were found. One for the age variable (55) and the other on the experience one (25). For both cases, a manual function was defined with the R software tool, which established that if the value of each of the variables was greater than the quantile or percentile 95, it would be attributed by the median, even though it was more robust than the median.
After that, the feature engineering was done. The original dataset was divided into two large sets: training and testing, using the initial split function of R with 85% prop. This implied that the training dataset kept the 85% of the initial data. This was due to the use of the training group to model the algorithm and testing to evaluate its performance.
The independent metric variable experience was focused and applied to the transformation of Yeo-Johnson. The categorical variables were then converted to indicator variables or dummies. Finally, the scores of the different studydependent variables were added. In this study, however, the independent variable of interest was the age of the participants.
Finally, polynomial regression was used. This is a simple approach to modelling nonlinear relationships by adding polynomial terms or quadratic terms to a regression.

Results
In the first instance, descriptive tests were applied to make it clear that similar scores were generally obtained in each of the dimensions (Table 2). Slightly noteworthy, the results of the ACD and DT dimension.  Consequently, the polynomial regression models were set up for each area of the teaching digital competence. The models that were significant (p <.05) will be presented below. In the case of the DT dimension, the model was not significant. The rest of the models elaborated from the dimensions of digital teaching competence did obtain significance.
Firstly, with reference to IDL (table 3), there were no significant differences in the participants' age groups. The model developed was significant and explained 17% of the data variance (R 2 = 0.173). In terms of the LCCD dimension, the linear regression model obtained was equally significant (Table 4). However, it also verified the absence of a digital divide among the participants according to their age. The model explained 19% of the variance of the data. Similarly, the model developed for the CDA dimension found that there were no significant differences in the responses given by the participants as a whole with respect to age ( Table 5). The model explained 15% of the total variance. Regarding the CS dimension (table 6), the extracted model was considered significant (p-value<.05), even though it showed that age was not an incident factor in the development of this skill set. Both the training and the test group were not significant. In contrast, the model developed for PS did show that age was a significant factor in determining significant differences among the participants analyzed (Table 7). Both the training and test data sets were significant. Similarly, the p-value of the model is valid. The percentage of explained reality is approximately 47% of the total variance. In short, the models obtained with the exception of the TD dimension were significant. Although the adjustment coefficient was not high, it can be established that, with the exception of the PS dimension, age is not a relevant factor in the digital competence of Dual Vocational Education and Training Teachers. Also, all intercepts were significant, indicating that it should be centered or removed.

Discussion
Clearly, age influences the ICTs knowledge and there is no point in denying that younger generations have a digital culture that was not available to the elderly (Fernandez-Cruz & Fernandez-Diaz, 2016;Prensky, 2001). However, the aim of the present piece work is to evaluate the level of digital competence of teachers. The results found in the descriptive analysis made it clear that teachers do not consider themselves deep digitally literate in practically any of the dimensions of digital competence. These results are similar to previous studies carried out at an international level (Amhag et al., 2019;Chandrasena, 2019;Li et al., 2019), which conclude by advocating the need for ongoing training for teachers, which would provide practical skills and abilities in digital matters to a teaching staff that increasingly needs to make frequent use of these tools and that, currently, does not see the teaching opportunities that these resources offer.
As for digital generational gap, the degree of qualification at the user level of ICTs knowledge by the teachers is understood, and the present study, in its only hypothesis, does not detect significant differences in age, which coincides with previous ones, such as those of Romero and Minelli (2011), Hernandez and Torrijos (2018), Fernandez Batanero and Torres Gonzalez (2015, etc. This is a result that, in spite of finding results in other similar studies, is in contrast to the digital divide observed in different educational stages, so we could not establish an accurate statement about the result found in this research, but it would be a description of the reality observed in this context (Nowak, 2019).
In spite of this,, the statistical study "partially" accepts null hypothesis 1, i.e. some differences are detected in certain areas of knowledge of the study. This could indicate that in certain aspects of e-skills, the age of the trainers is a determining factor.
There is mainly a significant difference in PS 1, which consists of the statement: "I try to individually solve basic technical problems that arise on my individual devices by helping me with tutorials". This means that younger teachers dare to personally solve the basic incidents that arise in the day-to-day without having to ask for help, while the older ones require more help, i.e. the older is the teacher, the higher is the dependency to solve technical problems individually. This difference can be caused by the insecurity of digital immigrants to try to solve problems, which make them choose to ask experts or other younger colleagues (Garrido-Lora et al., 2016).
It should be noted that the study detects other age differences in the area of "Degree of Information and Digital Literacy" and "Level of Communication and Collaboration of Digital Resources", but that they are scarcely significant to indicate the existence of an age gap, because their consideration is not excluded. However, these differences could indicate that younger people are better informed and digitally literate, and that they have a greater use of ICTs.
On the other hand, it should be noted that, according to the study, the values of digital competences in all areas are low, around 2.4 out of 4, indicating that teachers of all ages need better ICTs knowledge to implement digital tools in the classroom.
In short, although the adjustment of the elaborated models does not explain a great amount of variance, they provide interesting ideas regarding the state of the issue about the generational digital divide at the Dual Vocational Education and Training stage, a stage of which the investigative landscape is aware of little statistics, and therefore it might be relevant to provide quantitative approaches to the situation of its teachers.

Conclusion
The improvement of the skills in relation to the digital teaching competence is still a challenge to be completed by Spanish teachers. In the case of the Dual Vocational Education and Training stage, this statement has been found through this study, highlighting the need to promote a permanent and qualified digital training that could provide the knowledge that teachers currently demand at this stage.
In the case of the age factor, although the results obtained by the teachers analysed are generally low, there are no differences around this parameter, except in the problem-solving area where older teachers need more external assistance.
The causes of this non-generational gap in ICTs skills of Dual Vocational teachers are due to: • The necessary knowledge to transfer the Digital Competence to teaching is basic and teachers of any age are receiving permanent training to dispose of it.
• The percentage of teachers in the education system that are already digital natives and who contribute more to digital skills is always increasing.
In any case, the low knowledge identified in the study shows the necessity of l its improvement through teacher training and measures related to the lifelong education of teaching workers.
In conclusion, the development of the Digital Competence of teachers is crucial so that the right level in this competence can be passed on to the population, which has become even more evident and necessary following the health crisis of the pandemic in 2020. Inevitably, training will have to accelerate the inclusion of digital skills in the learning teaching process in order to adapt to the semi-presence modality needed today.

Suggestions
As suggestions and future prospects in this line of research, it is necessary for the research community to promote examples of digital innovation in the classroom, so that it serves as an example to teachers at all educational stages of how to carry out a sustainable practice in the classroom. For this reason, universities and teacher training centres, in particular, must become places that offer quality training in digital matters, and which provide examples of good practice in this area, so that teachers can incorporate it into their ordinary activity in the centre.

Limitations
With reference to the limitations of the study, they are framed by the sampling technique used, which was for convenience, being advisable to use random methods. Similarly, this is a descriptive study of a part of Spain, so it cannot infer the level of digital competence of the whole country.