ABSTRACT
In the COVID-19 reality, educational organizations worldwide faced the urgent need to transform the educational process to prevent the uncontrolled spread of infection while ensuring that students' competencies were built at the desired level. The primary way to solve this problem was an accelerated transition to distance education. In order to switch to this type of learning, educational institutions are devoting significant resources to training their staff in new teaching methods and improving technology for interacting with students. However, fast is not always good. Moreover, radical changes that do not correspond with the perceptions of the participants in the educational process may not bring the expected results, even if they are implemented in the spirit of the latest trends. In this regard, it is advisable to conduct research to update the ideas about the advantages and disadvantages of distance education, the timely identification of which can help improve the quality and effectiveness of the educational process. The paper presents the results of research conducted among the students of one of the flagship universities of Russia. The conducted study shows that students negatively perceive some advantages of distance education. Therefore, it is necessary to reconsider the conceptual foundations of distance education. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.