The outbreak of COVID-19 has been a major crisis factor in the various aspects of education, but it can be evaluated as meaningful in that it achieved changes in the educational operating system that had not been achieved before in a short period of time. In order for meaningful changes to be made from the perspective of innovation in the fields where distance education is being conducted at universities responding to COVID-19, it is necessary to check whether efforts for the changes are to be friendly to adult learners based on andragogy. For this, this study has examined the current status of online education at universities after COVID-19, focusing on the related studies, and derived issues for the improvement of universities’ constitutions as adult learner-friendly ones. Based on this, in preparation for the post-COVID-19, the following six measures were suggested for the revitalization of distance education to improve universities’ constitution as adult learner-friendly ones. First, insufficient quality of lectures and the need to strengthen professors’ capabilities such as teaching methods; second, reinforcement of interactions between instructors and learners and between learners; third, the need to increase learners’ ability for self-directed learning; fourth, preparation of the systematic learning design, evaluation, effective feedback and management measure; fifth, expanding the use of two-way platforms and advancement of functions; sixth, the flexibility of academic operation for activation of distance education. In particular, the sixth item, the expansion of andragogy-based academic operation flexibility, is expected that the activation of distance education will create a context and environment that can result in the improvement of universities’ constitution as adult learner-friendly ones from the perspective of university innovation.