This article considers post-pandemic implications for higher education institutions and explores the steps required to continue with online delivery, where desirable. Strategic considerations are outlined and priorities for development analysed to ensure higher education institutions can align, in a post-pandemic future, with quality assurance expectations for online education, especially where they are new to the online environment. An analysis of the Georgian higher education context exhibited highly transferable findings as it identified the specificities of the emergency response, highlighted experiences relevant to the transition phase and recommended criteria and guidelines to support the quality assurance of post-pandemic online education. While the Georgian pandemic experience has been as challenging as in other parts of the world, the fact that the whole sector was legally denied the opportunity to offer online education before COVID-19 makes for interesting analysis and confirms that post-pandemic online higher education development is as much an institutional decision as it is a systemic leap.