Teaching and learning became more challenging during the COVID-19 pandemic as classes moved online for both remote and hybrid learning. For hybrid learning, instructors harnessed various technologies to facilitate student–teacher engagement. Here we explored the use of an online collaborative platform, Miro Board, to aid teaching of organic chemistry for hybrid learning. We applied the revised Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework in our teaching exploration to support student–student and student–teacher interactions. Our experiences indicated that the use of Miro Board raises the social and learning presence in the revised CoI.

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The use of social media platforms to promote social interaction in a digital classroom is a common approach used by many educators. However, implementing such a platform is met with many challenges, the biggest being student shyness and reluctance in participating publicly. In this paper, we introduce the Supplementary Discourse (SD) model, inspired by the Supplementary Instruction (SI) model, where the goal is to promote student−student interactions in an online space. The SD model is also applied in an introductory organic chemistry course using Discord, a channel-based social media platform. By engaging students with tutors and discussion questions, we successfully catalyzed the formation of a student learning community, with the Discord server accumulating an average of 86 messages per week in a 13week period, with students commenting that they felt less intimidated to ask questions in the server.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the issue of educational inequality. There is evidence that students from low-income families and underrepresented minorities struggled to adjust to the digital environment for various reasons, exacerbating challenges that other students face in a digital classroom. To alleviate these inequalities, we propose that educators deliberately build online student communities using social or digital media platforms. However, establishing such communities prove challenging due to a lack of significant student participation. We suggest two key roles for the instructor: to provide engagement for student participation, and to carefully choose the online platform. For the former, we believe in engaging students through regular reminders and many open-ended discussion questions to spark discourse. For the latter, we suggest five criteria for educators to evaluate platforms: (1) interactional synchronicity; (2) familiarity, convenience and accessibility; (3) anonymity/pseudonymity; (4) distractions to learners; and (5) features for instructional design. With these as a guide, we are sure that online classrooms can provide peer support networks to alleviate educational inequalities, especially in issues regarding motivation and discipline.