Purpose of the research. The article discusses different views on online education: students, lecturers, politicians. Mass open online courses in the West began to be actively introduced in 2012, but after three years, European and American universities started disappointing in them and began to reduce their importance in training. In Russia, online learning is a popular modern educational trend, which is increasingly being talked about at the highest level and which is promoted by central universities that strive to cover the entire educational space with their digital courses. In October 2019, the Russian Federation President’s special representative for digital and technological development Mr. Dmitry Peskov described key trends for Russian universities in the next five - ten years: the first scenario is “cannibalistic" — several leading universities create online platforms and actually wash the core of regional universities. The second is digital platforms and digitalization, when all universities create their online courses. But behind all this, practically no voices of students are heard — do they want to massively switch to distance education on the Internet? The purpose of this study is to answer this question.

Materials and methods. The study of students’ opinions was conducted in 2019 (from May to December) at the Ufa State Aviation Technical University (USATU). The work was carried out as part of the study of the basic course “Psychology and Pedagogy", which is taught to first-year undergraduates and second-year graduate students and during pedagogical practice for second-year undergraduates and third-year graduate students. The main method was a written survey of students about the advantages and disadvantages of online learning, followed by a group discussion in the classroom.

The resultswere tested at the “Winter School of the Lecturer - 2020", which was held in January 2020 by the Yurait Publishing House for lecturers from Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Ukraine. The research materials were presented at the webinar “Online education through the eyes of students" (speaker — A. Ivanova) and caused wide discussion and multiple feedback from the audience in a group chat. The paper presents the results of a survey of students of USATU and statements from the chat of lecturers.

Conclusion. The conclusions obtained as a result of processing the survey of graduate and postgraduate students of the USATU almost completely coincided with the conclusions of the lecturers participating in the “Winter School of Lecturer - 2020": the school and the first post-secondary education (secondary or higher) must be received in the “classical" format. Everyone recognized the best options for applying online education: advanced training; receiving a second education; self-development courses on the latest discoveries and technologies. Distance education must be developed, but only without campaigning: consciously, methodically and technologically thought out. It is necessary to check offline the “qualifications" of people with online diplomas. The main thing is not to rush in the pursuit of ratings and economic benefits with the adoption of ill-conceived and reckless decisions that can lead to intellectual degradation of youth and the correction of which will cost our state a hundred times more.