Online Education in Hungary and Armenia during the Pandemic and Its Aftermath

After the breakout of the COVID-19 pandemic our lives have been profoundly changed, including higher education, where a digital form has emerged as a result. This paper presents some of the results of nearly two and a half years of research conducted in two countries. The first objective was to analyse the experience of the transition to digital education, digital competencies and equipment of staff during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the second was to summarise the impact of the alternatives to digital education at universities after the pandemic. It was also aimed at describing how digital education at the universities of these two countries with very different cultures has been tackled and whether the experiences are different. The research was carried out by means of a questionnaire including 592 instructors from Hungary and 111 from Armenia. The researchers analysed the data using SPSS 28 statistical software. Univariate and multivariate analyses were conducted, including frequency, mean and standard deviation tests, cross-tabulation analysis, ANOVA, independent samples t-test, and correlation. analyse The current study suggests that the two culturally different countries did not have completely different practices, and also the smoothness of the transition to digital education has a major impact on how digital solutions are integrated into university education in the two countries in the future. To conclude, the pandemic induced the emergence of online education, which is here to stay with us in the future to supplement traditional, offline forms.