# Perception of the Use of Virtual Reality Didactic Tools among Faculty in Mexico
## 4 Discussion
The main original and innovative results of the present work are those that identify differences in the assessments of VR according to the area of knowledge of Mexican professors. In this sense, the results identify a strong gap, mainly between Engineering and Humanities professors. Indeed, Engineering professors give very high ratings to the characteristics and didactics of VR and are those who claim to have greater digital skills and identify fewer disadvantages in the use of VR (Table 5). On the other hand, Humanities professors are those who express a lower level of digital competence, value to a lesser extent the technical aspects of VR, and detect a greater number of disadvantages in the didactic use of VR. The high ratings given by Engineering professors to VR technologies is somethingfound in the literature [40; 50]. The novelty here is to note how the assessment of the didactic use of VR is positively linked to the level of technological specialization of the professors, so that those who have, in principle, less technological specialization--Humanities professors--are the ones who offer lower ratings, at least in the case of Mexican professors. Another novel and original contribution of the present study is the analysis of the behavior of the gender gap in the perceptions of Mexican professors about VR in each area of knowledge. Both in the more specifically technological area--Engineering--and in the areas of a humanistic-social nature--Humanities and Social Sciences--males report higher ratings than females, both of their own digital competence and of VR (Figure 6). In contrast, in the scientific areas--Sciences and Health Sciences--it is females who give higher ratings of VR than males (Figure 6). The digital gender gap among Latin American professors is an aspect that has been widely studied, and the literature shows that females generally fall behind males in digital competence [51], in access to digital technologies [52; 53], and in the assessment of the didactic use of didactic tools such as VR [54]. The novelty of the results presented here is that they show that this gender gap is not homogeneous in the case of professors in Mexico but behaves differently with the area of knowledge, so that a more technological area does not necessarily lead to the gap being corrected. A subsequent qualitative exploratory study will be necessary to try to identify the reasons for this difference in behavior, and an extended quantitative study will be necessary to verify whether this is a specific Mexican phenomenon, or whether it is a global phenomenon in the region. The results also show that the digital generation gap among Mexican professors in terms of their assessment of VR behaves differently depending on the area of knowledge. Thus, in both Engineering and Humanities, it is the digital immigrants who better value the technical and didactic aspects of VR, while in Sciences and Health Sciences, the digital natives value the didactic aspects of VR better than the digital immigrants (Figure 7). The literature had shown that the digital generation is an explanatory variable of digital competence [51] and of the ratings of the didactic use of VR, with digital natives being generally more inclined to use virtual tools [32; 55]. The novelty here lies in showing that, once again, the behavior of this digital divide depends strongly on the area of knowledge, with digital natives only surpassing digital immigrants in their assessments of VR in the areas of Sciences and Social Sciences. Both in the more technical areas--Engineering--and in those, in principle, more distant from technology--Humanities--digital immigrants outperform digital natives in their ratings, which suggests the idea that technical training does not explain the behavior of this digital divide, at least not completely. Therefore, it is necessary to go deeper into identifying the reasons underlying these differences, starting with a subsequent exploratory study.