While there has been extensive research done on technology supporting communication and interaction in online higher education, this research focus on the potential of new web development tools for designing educational technologies. With the recent advent and maturity of the HTML5-standard together with CSS3 and advanced javascript libraries such as jQuery andNode.js developers now have access to tools enabling them to create dynamic, web-based systemssupporting rich social interaction & collaboration between students & educators with features that were previously only available in proprietary applications. This paper reports from an ongoingresearch project utilizing a design research approach aimed at creating and evaluating such a tool.