According to Nahalka (2021), the instructors who solved the sudden changes from traditional to online practices the best were the ones who had already held less traditional, and more constructivist beliefs about teaching and learning. Teachers who had before the pandemic seen the learners as constructors of knowledge and had paid attention to develop or monitor their self-directedness, differentiation and personalisation found it less problematic to change (Nahalka, 2021). Thus, the dividing line was found neither to be between younger and older, nor familiar or unfamiliar teachers with online education, but much rather between “the ones incapable of abandoning traditional pedagogical culture and the ones who have already surpassed it” (Nahalka, 2021, p. 28, the author’s translation).

To establish relationships between students’ perceptions of online education with their motivation, autonomy, and emotions, Csizér and colleagues (2021) surveyed the ERT experiences of 187 Hungarian secondary EFL learners from three schools of the capital city. 73% of the participants expressed that their learning English online followed the usual patterns, but almost half of the participants claimed that they only had one synchronous EFL class a week and keeping in contact with teachers mainly relied on written correspondence (Csizér et al., 2021). The similarity of online classes to the traditional ones correlated positively with learners’ feelings and motivation, but those students who said to have invested less time learning English in the online sphere experienced shame to a greater extent. This, according to Csizér and colleagues (2021), signals that their motivation had been largely extrinsic. The positive and negative emotional effects of the ERT period was also the focus of Sáfrány’s (2021) study, who interviewed ten secondary learners, five of whose anxiety lowered, and five of whose anxiety increased throughout online education. The results confirmed that the core personality of students did not change throughout the online educational period, but those students who struggled to commute to school experienced less anxiety when they had to learn from the comfort of their own homes. However, where the family imposed even stricter curfew measures or experienced escalating conflicts, students reported growing anxiety towards at-home learning (Sáfrány, 2021). The two studies (Csizér et al., 2021; Sáfrány et al., 2021) together shed light on the fact that students face multiple levels of studying-related challenges, be it in connection with one school subject or family environment, while the combination of both factors could have influenced their views on online education. Another important aspect of the studies has been that in both samples, access to technology and computer driving skills did not prove to be sources of negative feelings or anxiety for the learners.

Several studies concluded that most learners, teachers, principals, and parents were satisfied with online education relative to the pandemic circumstances (Fekete & Porkoláb, 2020). Nevertheless, the younger learners were, the more substantial disadvantage they suffered (Molnár et al., 2021). Serious differences were observed between prior years’ and 2020 achieved reading, reading comprehension and numeracy skills of primary learners (Molnár et al., 2021). While technology-mediated education clearly contributed to these objectively worsening results, differences between individual students’ skills usually become larger as they mature (Molnár et al., 2021), and it might rightfully be technology that could contribute to some levels of personalised and differentiated teaching to bridge these existing differences. This means that part of the problem was indeed ERT-related, but other parts of the problem concern more fundamental pedagogical issues. The observation that the pandemic contributed to revealing core education-related problems is echoed in the literature (Peters et al., 2020). As mentioned earlier, digital courses require extensive prior planning, but even if the planning phase is carried out conscientiously, it is urged that implementation be carried out by a subject expert teacher with ample prior experience with digital teaching. Until these ideal circumstances are met, it is hardly surprising that most educational technology use during the pandemic was superior to clearly voiced learning goals (Czirfusz et al., 2020). Technology inclusion was mainly found not to have been pedagogically reasoned for and aimed at entertaining learners as opposed to subordinately being the means of learning.

In a study involving 216 Hungarian primary and secondary (K12) teachers conducted after the ERT period, it was found that the average age of K12 teachers was 50 years, and 93.5% of them mentioned that their main source of technological pedagogical knowledge was a result of self-education. Although 50% of the informants had participated in technology-related training programmes and had learnt from their immediate colleagues, only 25% of training opportunities were related to specific school subjects (Fekete, 2020a). Additionally, 37.5% of participants reported instances of participating in training programmes aimed at the very basics (e.g., word processing, Internet browsing and emailing) of technology. In a similar context, it was surveyed what the teachers at a secondary foundation school of Budapest did to ensure a smooth transformation to digital education (Jenei & Sváb, 2021). It was found that teachers’ initial experiences correlated with their digital competences, and their average confidence scores rose from M = 4.83 (SD = 0.71; in March 2020) to M = 4.86 (SD = 0.81; in June 2020) and to M = 4.90 (SD = 1.00; in December 2020), albeit the growing standard deviation values suggest growing individual differences, too (Jenei & Sváb, 2021). The most frequent method of digital competence and technological pedagogical knowledge development was a result of experimenting with technological tools and self-education (Jenei & Sváb, 2021).

To paint a more detailed picture regarding the technological pedagogical knowledge levels of 216 Hungarian K12 teachers forming a non-representative convenience sample, cluster analysis was applied (Fekete, 2022). In the sample (N = 216), the analysis confirmed that approximately 20% of the informants were Beginners, 41% were Independent, and 39% were Advanced users of techno-pedagogical tools and methods. No statistically significant difference was found between Hungarian K12 teachers in the different groups based on their age, gender, teaching experience, qualification, and career model (Fekete, 2022). Teachers in all groups reported gains in their techno-pedagogical skills, and this gain proved to be statistically significant, but there is still much room for improvement in teacher education and training programmes (Dringó-Horváth & Gonda, 2018; Öveges & Csizér, 2018) because Beginners, for example, only now learnt how to use devices for keeping in touch with their students. For teachers, simply learning more about technology and digital devices would not result in techno-pedagogical gains (Czirfusz et al., 2020; Dringó-Horváth & Gonda, 2018; M. Pintér, 2019).