The global crisis of COVID-19 has severely impacted the entire higher education sector (Marinoni et al., 2020) and spurred timely, innovative, and radical responses from educational institutions across the sector and the world. The focus of much of this attention has been on flagship universities (University World News, 2020). However, the impact of COVID-19 has been even more severe on other institutional types, such as community colleges. About two-thirds of the 20,000 universities worldwide reported that online classes had substituted face to face teaching while the altered practices of teaching and learning through digital means call for new pedagogies, access to the Internet, digital devices and technical infrastructure, as well as digital literacies of instructors and students from diverse backgrounds (Marinoni et al., 2020). This study focuses on an exploration of the effects and implications of COVID-19 on the case study of Hong Kong community colleges. The higher education that community colleges deliver traditionally depends on the concept of dynamic learning community, featuring liberal teacher-student interactions and pedagogic environment, learner-centred formative assessment, effective student services for strategic university articulation, and dynamic student activities and engagement (Tang and Dang, 2019). In the case of Hong Kong, a small community college campus in Hong Kong that serves as a hub of geographic location where the above-mentioned activities take place in real time. In late 2019, it was unprecedented that COVID-19 made Hong Kong’s community colleges close their campus and moved teaching, learning and assessment completely online. This study engages in the case study of Hong Kong’s community colleges in view of how it mitigated COVID-19 through organisational adaptation and sustained the delivery of higher education, especially when global pandemic may persist in upcoming times. Copyright © 2020 CHER-Hong Kong.