Over the past decades, the Russian tertiary sector has undergone profound changes caused by economic and social factors. The paper focuses on the challenges that modern universities are facing nowadays. One of the challenges is pedagogical and methodological professional development of academic staff, which has been affected by the COVID-19 crisis. However, a rapid shift to online teaching and learning has offered new opportunities to capacity building of staff and faculty who have learned and tested new tools and systems to enable distance teaching and learning. USUE case is considered.