Educational life worldwide has been shaken by the closure of schools due to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. The ripple effects have been felt in the way both teachers and students have adapted to the constraints imposed by the new online form of education. The present study focuses exclusively on the beneficiaries of the educational process and aims to find out their perceptions of face-to-face and e-learning and their desire to return, or not, to the traditional form of education. These perceptions are represented by 604 students of the Politehnica University of Timisoara, who were asked to respond anonymously to an 8-question questionnaire between December 2020 and February 2021. The results show the respondents’ levels of desire to return to school (especially of those who have only benefited from e-learning) and their degree of involvement during online classes. The results also specify the advantages and disadvantages of the two forms of education from a double perspective, namely that of first-year students (beneficiaries of e-learning exclusively), and of upper-year students (beneficiaries of both face-to-face and e-learning). The study points out key information about e-learning from the students’ perspectives, which should be considered to understand the ongoing changes of the educational process and to solve its specific problems, thus ensuring its sustainability.

This study examines teachers’ negative attitudes toward artificial intelligence (AI) in education, focusing on the role of digital literacy, demographic characteristics, and direct AI experience. Using a quantitative cross-sectional design, data were collected from 1110 Romanian pre-university teachers through a self-administered online questionnaire. Exploratory factor analysis confirmed a two-dimensional structure of negative attitudes—Perceived AI Threat and Distrust in the Fairness and Ethics of AI—with good internal reliability (α = 0.93 and α = 0.62, respectively). Results indicated significant gender differences, with women reporting higher levels of perceived threat, while distrust in AI fairness showed no significant variation across gender, age, or teaching degree. Teachers in urban areas expressed greater skepticism toward AI ethics than those in rural settings. Higher levels of digital literacy were negatively correlated with both dimensions of negative attitudes, suggesting that digital competence mitigates technological anxiety. Moreover, frequent personal and professional use of AI predicted lower perceived threat levels, emphasizing the moderating role of experiential familiarity. These findings advance understanding of the psychosocial and cognitive factors shaping educators’ perceptions of AI and highlight the importance of AI literacy programs that integrate technical, ethical, and reflective components to foster informed and confident engagement with intelligent technologies.

As a main ideologue of Ceaușescu’s communist regime during the 1970s and a key public figure throughout its entire existence, Dumitru Popescu’s reflections on Romanian national communism, a local brand of national communism that he helped to create, are not to be disregarded. Likewise, special attention must also be devoted to his analyses of the post-communist transition. So far, Popescu’s political thinking has not been systematically investigated in scientific endeavors. Moreover, it tends to be overlooked or considered as a sort of appendix to his impressive body of literary works and journals. This article aims to explore and critically discuss the way Popescu’s national communism evolved during the 1970s and 1980s and how it endured and recalibrated itself in the first decades after the 1989 anti-communist revolution within a new ideological framework, that of overtly predatory capitalism. It does so by analyzing Popescu’s ideas of personality cult, social class, and youth, all representative of the official socialist discourse.