Today we are faced with a different way of teaching and learning. On the one hand, virtual teaching proved to be the solution to continue learning, with new ways of sharing content, greater interaction, and almost immediate responses. Students realized that they are able to be more independent than they thought in acquiring knowledge and have greater freedom to learn. Teachers took on a new role as mediators and facilitators of content. Everyone had to learn to innovate. And the biggest effort was, without a doubt, getting everyone to follow along. In the face of this unexpected crisis, technology was the salvation and changed the classroom forever. The pandemic caused by COVID-19 accelerated the digital transformation in the education sector, and there are changes that are here to stay. Technology will be more present in the classroom; it will coexist. However, everything would have been more effective if teachers and students had had the time and resources to prepare themselves.
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The Covid-19 pandemic has led to more than 1.2 billion children in 186 countries affected by school closures due to the pandemic, according to data from UNESCO. To solve the impossibility of conducting in-person classes, many educational institutions around the world have joined distance education. Given the forced change in the education format, the question arises about how these children will learn after the pandemic. The adoption of technology for education in the job market has risen with the possibility of online training offerings. In education, until the need to expand access to more students caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, distance education was restricted to universities (Dwivedi et al., 2020); (Dahnoun, 2020). One of the reasons for the advance of distance learning in higher education is the possibility of cost reduction. Making courses cheaper would increase their accessibility to the poorest strata of the population. However, education experts indicate that as online classes allow lower costs with the teaching staff, some institutions have opted for the removal of their more qualified and, consequently, more expensive professionals, which would harm the quality of teaching (Diaz Lantada, 2020) ;(Dwivedi et al., 2020); (Dahnoun, 2020); (Sulkowski et al., 2021). It is important to emphasize that the above scenario cannot be understood as common to all institutions that offer distance learning. Many schools still invest in hiring more qualified teachers, including as a competitive advantage to attract more students. The bet that the education and training sector was already making in digital technologies increased with the context created by COVID-19 (Iivari et al., 2020). The channels and ways of teaching are changing, as well as the content. And there are new trends on the way. The area of education and training has been transformed by digital technologies for a long time (Cunha et al., 2020). The arrival of the internet has brought a drastically increased possibility of accessing information, as well as immediate research on numerous digital platforms, paid or free. Added to the ability to combine an unprecedented breadth and depth of themes, with the presentation of content in various formats, such as video and audio, allowing access to knowledge outside the classroom in a variety of ways that suit the capabilities, preferences, and availability of each user. This radical change in learning habits outside the classroom has already forced the formal education system to follow some of the new trends, innovating in terms of channels, formats, and content (Ayman et al., 2020); (Iivari et al., 2020). Technology is not only enabling the transformation of traditional education, but also bringing new courses and specific training, made available online by institutions and companies, taught by professionals, liberalizing the development of skills, at a lower cost and without geographic limitations (Seres et al., 2018) ;(Cunha et al., 2020).