Developing social and communication skills is crucial for students across disciplines. To foster this, students must engage with other students. However, this may be inherently more difficult for commuting students. Two studies are outlined here. The first study n=54 surveyed computer science students from two universities on their study habits outside of class, revealing a strong preference for studying alone due to factors like commuting or task suitability. To address the commuting issues and increase participation of commuting students, we introduced “AnoPlatform”, a metaverse platform facilitating group work for both commuting and non-commuting students. In a subsequent study (n=176 in the pre- and n=113 in the post-test), we assessed the impact of this platform. We did not find a statistically significant impact of the platform on social learning activities for commuting students. However, we were able to gain insights into how this could potentially be improved and also report on initial data on the use of such a platform in flipped classroom settings post-pandemic.