Since modern technologies produce new global education trends, education prospects redesign, and new opportunities and threats assessments are needed. The new educational technology development phase was researched as an answer to modern world challenges. The strategic priorities of education in the EU are analyzed. New technologies, practices, and related needs: financing, digital integration, accessibility, informational security were studied and generalized. Higher education key trends and their transformation in the context of the COVID-19 crisis new opportunities and threats were researched. The analysis of the seven years of NMC Horizon and other research emerging educational technologies adoption forecasts provided in the research shows significant discrepancies related to extreme uncertainty. Five educational trend groups from the NMC Horizon report 2020 were reviewed. The author defined the remote education tools and their importance on the example of the university providing online/mixed learning. The anonymous polls among lecturers and students performed in the spring of 2020 (just after the COVID-19 quarantine announcement) show the most highly demanded tools are Google Meet, email, specific learning systems such as Moodle. The barriers to fully-fledged remote education are technical problems and occasionally poor Internet connectivity. The participants are quite ready to learn and to use digital tools for education. However, the absence of live communication increases workload during online learning, and other factors arise as the factors lowering student activity. During severe transformation, the main tasks of education are accessibility and diversity