Learning during COVID-19 Pandemic: Online Education Community, based on Discord

Education has been highly affected during the Covid pandemic. From one day to another, from kindergartens to universities, everyone involved in education has struggled to keep it going despite all the difficulties and restrictions. In our department, we coordinate two study programs in Computer Science (bachelor and master level). More than a year ago, we started to use the Discord communication platform to keep in touch in real time with our students and alumni. Our initial goal has been to create a strong ever growing community, in which our students, their former colleagues, and faculty can communicate easily. When the lockdown started, it was obvious that continuing to build and expand this community was the way to go. The last semester and the current one, we have been using Discord enhanced by a set of in-house developed scripts to communicate with the students, to keep going with both lectures and laboratories, according to the schedule, to have both the semester and the graduation exams, and so on. In this paper, we present our approach of continuing education during the pandemic (both requirements and solutions), and the lessons learnt during this experience.