This article analyses the situation concerning the education issue and especially contemporary online courses. The main objectives of our work are to compare digital learning before COVID-19 and after it, to consider the concept of «education digitalization», to study and analyze the practices of modern digital educational tools that contribute to the most effective process of forming a foreign language communicative competence of students, to study the impact of the rapid introduction of information and communication technologies on the conceptual approaches to the prospective development of foreign language learning. In order to carry out an effective analysis of the developments in digital language education, such methods as data collecting and accumulating, observation, analysis and comparison are applied. Much of the work focuses on the development of digital technology in education and the role of the pandemic in teaching foreign languages is also indicated.