**1. Introduction**

COVID-19 had a devastating impact on all parts of our society, including significant effects on education. In particular, the closure of universities and schools caused a tremendous shift in teachers' and students' routines. Instead of delivering face-toface classroom-based learning activities, teachers had to switch overnight to online delivery modes most had never applied before. Perhaps some teachers had already

experimented with online delivery modes on a small scale (e.g. for maintaining contact and supervising students during their internships). However, face-to-face delivery modes had been the standard in most types of education, including professional and vocational education, until COVID-19 arrived. Not only were teachers and students caught off guard by how the COVID-19 pandemic restricted their everyday lives, they also needed to adapt within a few weeks to novel ways of teaching and learning when universities and schools closed.

It is worthwhile to emphasise that in many cases teachers and students were able to shift towards online education, something with which they were unfamiliar. However, doing so had its price: faculty members noted high levels of frustration, anxiety and stress about half a year after the pandemic began. Increased workloads and a deterioration of work-life balance frequently caused strong feelings of longing for careers outside education or even the desire for early retirement [1].

It also is likely that teachers experienced lower levels of self-efficacy when they were forced to switch to teaching online, since their unfamiliarity with online teaching may have increased their sensitivity to burnout [2].

Students too were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. A large-scale study among university students showed that they experienced higher levels of isolation because of the lack of interaction with fellow students and teachers. Students expressed mixed feelings about the shift to exclusively online learning activities, such as lectures, small-group meetings, individual supervision and coaching sessions [3].

In addition to the many negative experiences related to solely online education, the surveyed students in professional and vocational education mentioned advantages of combining classroom-based learning activities on campus with online education. COVID-19 caused students and teachers to become engaged – however involuntarily – in online education, and their experiences offer insights from which we may benefit in the years ahead. This study provides insights into how teachers in professional and vocational education and their students perceived the advantages of online education experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and the learnings they considered worthwhile to implement permanently afterwards. The study applied a Group Concept Mapping (GCM) approach that elicits the affordances from the participants themselves instead of asking them to fill out pre-defined questionnaires designed by researchers.
