Lessons Learned from Pandemics in the Context of Digital Transformation of Education

2020 brought the world huge challenges in almost every field when the new COVID-19 virus began to spread rapidly. Digitalization made it possible to use innovative solutions to ensure access to various services, to continue working, and to learn from a distance, but it made the situation different from the one we all were familiar with and raised questions on how to ensure qualitative education for all. The situation where the whole world had to move education to the digital environment at the same time posed many challenges for teachers, students, and parents. The aim of the present research was to find out how the COVID-19 crisis contributed to the digital transformation of education. Several complementary research methods were used to obtain results, one of which was used to analyze the functionality and degree of interactivity of learning platforms, providing an educational perspective to this research. The second method was focus group discussions with experts in technology-enhanced learning to gather ideas for overcoming the crisis and to outline future directions for the digital transformation of education in the context of remote learning. The third method was a survey of teachers who work with students of compulsory education. This material provides an overview of methods used by the WP6 working group “Education System Transformation: Consequences of the COVID-19 Crisis and Possible Solutions” (VPP-COVID-2020/1-0013), part of the National Research Program project.