The COVID-19 pandemic has enabled teachers to re-create distance learning in new ways, and this knowledge can be applied in the post-pandemic period of schooling and other similar special cases. In this respect, our article aims at presenting a series of findings related to the students' perspective of their virtual learning path in the pandemic and post-pandemic period, as well as discussing some of the perceived challenges that the return to the classroom may pose. In the first part, the article covers a theoretical overview of virtual education and analyzes learning from the perspective of several learning theories, relevant for teaching/learning foreign languages. In the second part, we dwell on the transfer from the virtual environment to the traditional face-to-face learning, and point out to the need to rethink and readjust some teaching strategies so as to match the distressing reality of having faced a pandemic. In the last part of our paper, we are going to present the students' views on their own transition learning experience. We have also highlighted some of the strategies that we have been using in the classroom in order to make the transition from the online environment to the offline learning more manageable, with a special emphasis on the awareness that in this unprecedented special context both the students' and the teachers' emotional well-being must be prioritized, given the distress all the actors in the didactic process have been subjected to for the last two years.

online, offline, learning, reconnecting, transition, autonomy