Discovering Collaborative e-Learning Through an Online Writing Course

At the University of Padua in Italy, PhD students at the Faculty of Engineering do not attend traditional lectures as they did when they were undergraduate students; instead, they focus most of their time on research activities. When these students obtain significant results from their research, they must complete their projects by publishing these results in English, which is "now indisputably the language of international scholarship and research" (Flowerdew 1999, 243). Although most of these students do not find it difficult to read in English, they do have a lot of difficulty writing and speaking in English; moreover, most students even find writing in Italian a challenge since the only paper they have written is their degree thesis.