Dear Reader,

This new decade began with a pandemic. It has shattered our everyday lives, our usual social life. A health emergency was introduced, and schools were ordered to close, and education was suddenly confronted with a new reality: it has become necessary to study and teach at home, using alternative teaching and learning forms and methods. This situation has been a giant challenge for students, teachers, researchers, and society as a whole; it took almost days to adapt to the new circumstances.

And how well it has succeeded will be the subject of many scientific articles soon. We can be sure that creative educators will develop several innovative solutions that will also offer many new opportunities for researchers. This year’s first issue of the journal Opus et Educatio contains 10 research reports written just before the epidemic but do not detract from their topicality.

Studies can be categorized according to several perspectives. First, geographically. Most of the authors come from the Carpathian Basin educational space, which carries a special vision in education, including teacher training. The authors of each study are from the United States and Kenya. The latter two studies provide some framework for the structure of our present issue. The authors of the first study, Kate K. Mays, and her co-authors report the results of a representative empirical study conducted in the United States to map the acceptance of virtual reality and artificial intelligence in education. Kenyan author Moses Njenga also reports on the informal CPD practice of 40 TVET teachers in the Nairobi metropolitan area as part of an empirical study.

The paper by Katalin Kanczné Nagy guides us into the second half of the 19th century and presents the impact of the then Hungarian industrial law on vocational education and training, and Barnabás Vajda dissects the question that arises from time to time about the real purpose of history teaching.The authors of the next two studies, Agáta Csehi and Renáta Marosi describe the positive effects of the arts on education by presenting a methodological investigation and a methodological innovation.

The research group called Ratio, founded at J. Selye University, conducts pedagogical research, and two of their results have now been included in this issue. Katalin Kanczné Nagy and Agáta Csehi focus on the personality traits of pedagogical students through the use of the Sensation Seeking Scale, developed by Zuckerman, and Kinga Horváth and Péter Tóth mapped the ideal teacher interaction concerning the Wubbels model through a widely used questionnaire (QTI).

Janka Poráčová and her colleagues give a comprehensive study on tertiary education in the European Union and employment opportunities for graduates. Using the sociolinguistics and ethnography methods, Flóra Kancz examined how the linguistic identification and social integration of young students studying in Hungary living in the Western European diaspora but with a Hungarian background are influenced by the minority policy of the motherland.

Finally, the guest editor can only hope that he managed to outline a sufficiently diverse and colourful projection of useful and inspiring further research, both in the higher education space in the Carpathian Basin and in the research carried out by those involved.

Budapest March 2021

Péter Tóth

Guest Editor of this issue