The Gameover in Universities Education Management during the Pandemic COVID-19: Challenges to Sustainable Development in a Digitalized Environment

The COVID-19 pandemic, which began in February 2020, has radically changed the processes related to higher education. The main purpose of our study is to help scholar communities distinguish between educational approaches that seek to sustain the “unsustainable” and to identify the problems of lecturer–student interaction in the midst of the mass transition to distance learning and to find ways to solve them. The results of our research show that the transition to distance education during the pandemic took place; however, it highlighted a whole complex of problems connected with deterioration of emotional state and reduction of incentives to study. That might challenge the existing status quo, a revision of the principles of “Humboldt universities” and the birth of new forms of education. The study consists of three parts that allow analyzing the lecturer–student relations, as well as the management of the learning process. The first part analyzes the characteristics and attitudes towards distance education in different countries. The second part presents the results of students’ emotional state in two countries with different population restriction regimes. The third part is devoted to the study of students’ time planning in the distance-learning environment. We used the following methods to achieve the goals of the study: a questionnaire survey of students and lecturers, HADS (The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale), and self-timing method. The thesis about the “gameover” in universities education management is open for discussion by the scientific community.