In the context of the Covid‑19 pandemic, teacher education at universities has faced great problems concerning the teaching-learning practice. Educational processes have become possible only with the help of digital technologies. The development of digital technologies and the new level of accessibility to educational resources have opened up new ways for teaching and learning and the creation of new didactic scenarios. The reopening of educational institutions after the Covid‑19 is followed by many tasks that challenge the main actors in the teaching-learning process in a new way. The authors reflect on whether it makes sense for teachers and future teachers to continue learning how to work with digital technologies and create new learning formats for their students. In order to develop teacher education at universities and serious attention to digital didactics, not only the challenges but also the pedagogical senses of the Covid‑19 pandemic need to be identified. The unconscious and «detached» perception of current digital transformations in educational policy, higher teacher education and school education hinders the development of teacher education at the university and decreases the role of the teacher in society. A comparative analysis of cases of teacher education from five Eastern European universities is used to address these goals. The analysis aims to examine the hypotheses stated with inductive reasoning

Although the COVID-19 pandemic is far from over, there is no doubt that education researchers will analyze the changes in teaching and learning over the years to come. There is no certainty that new waves and variants of COVID-19 will not force humanity to radically change educational technologies in the future. This will bring mankind closer to the predictions of science-fiction authors and futurists, not taken seriously before. In this regard, it is important to scientifically document and analyze various measures for transforming education in the current situation, thus, creating the database for future generations. Analysis reveals that geographically adjacent countries with numerous current or historical interrelations, show the uniqueness of their response to the pandemic because of a number of current economic, social, cultural and geographical factors. Quite promising in this regard are the post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which in the second half of the 20th century had almost identical principles for developing national education systems, but changed significantly under the influence of the reforms of the last thirty years. Comparing the cases of five universities from Russia, Germany, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic and the Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic enable us, not only to identify common problems, but also to describe the most effective measures for the reorganization of higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic, dictated by the need to sustain the quality of teacher training.