COVID-19 has brought terrors to the situations of the most vulnerable countries and marginalized communities on a macro-scale. Not only has this pandemic affected millions of lives that ignited a worldwide crisis in the lens of health care and the economy, but it also outraged social and digital divides that heighten the gateways for neoliberalism to spiral during the pandemic. This article reflects on the dichotomy brought by the COVID-19 pandemic in Higher Educational Institutions in the Philippines. The implementation of emergency distance learning poses unfamiliarity in the education sector given the constraints in technological, logistics, and financial resources. Conversely, the crisis establishes opportunities for online learning to a scaffold in exploring, highlighting, and strengthening new ways of learning post-pandemic. In a nutshell, this crisis has given tons of lessons learned in terms of widening academic horizons for the improvement of online learning integration in the educative process of a developing country in the next normal.