## 1 Introduction  
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the importance of e-learning. It not only provided a way to guarantee uninterrupted educational access, but also demonstrated the importance of preparing high-quality online educational materials to prevent last minute improvisations. As shown in [1], similar improvisations have mostly led to the adaption of traditional classroom approaches rather than to the implementation of a new educational paradigm such as virtual classrooms [2, 3] or MOOC's [4]--the ones which can be characterized as \"pedagogical retooling\" [5]. One new paradigm is the Virtual Reality Environment (VRE), broadly specified as \"a digital representation of a three dimensional object and/or environment\" for educational purposes [6]. Its applications are versatile: to facilitate experiential learning, increase the level of engagement and motivation and promote collaborative learning. All these features are critical for future managers and leaders. Below we demonstrate the VRE applications serving these purposes. Having powerful information and communication technology (ICT) allows us to consider VRE as a retooling instrument for knowledge and skills delivery--in our case to transform university humanities courses and make them more interactive, offering \"hands-on\" elements. As [7] stresses, the leading idea of retooling should be based on a proper communication of teachers with their learners exploiting contemporary ICT. The VRE, which allows students to act and to conduct experiments, offers such an option. First, it entails the learners' immersion into a specific, realistic environment. Then, their individual experiences become a basis for wider discussions and confrontations, exploiting their real-life involvement, observations and challenges, together with textbook and study material content, course goals, etc. The visitors' telexistence is determined by their real-time interaction within the given environment in a 3D space plus their self-projection into it in the form of avatars [8; 9]. In the examples below, students' avatars act on their behalf: as a company owner in the finance course or a new employee in marketing. The student-teacher communication is rearranged in innovative ways, e.g., by presenting educators as the avatars, too. It all implies a high potential of VRE-tailored environments for education. It creates solid presumptions for the students' strong involvement into the subject matter as well as for their deeper and personalized comprehension of course aims and challenges. In this paper, we describe a pilot project using a VRE, developed for this project in our university--business partnership project with Presentigo, s. r. o. (Inc., Incorporated Company) The VRE was exploited as a development tool for two courses: finance and marketing at the Faculty of Economics at VSB-Technical University of Ostrava. How VRE functions and ways of communication with students are explained. Although the first plans and designs existed prior the pandemic, the VREs themselves were developed during the crisis. For this reason, their implementation into classrooms was accelerated to facilitate online education with effective teaching tools and to minimize the emergency-enforced format (face-to-display lectures and seminars). The research was conducted in collaboration with the educators of the Faculty of Pedagogy at the University of Ostrava. In essence, it concentrated on two research questions: _Can VRE facilitate development of knowledge and skills in humanities? Does the VRE facilitate knowledge and skills in particular courses?_ A detailed description of VRE is in Section 2.2. The speed of implementation caused by the sudden move to online teaching partially affected testing and verification of VRE classrooms. Only one VRE could be properly tested using the proper pedagogical experiment consisting of a test and a control group. In the second classroom, the VRE was also utilized, but due to various scheduling reasons, this group could not be pre-tested.