As increasing numbers of undergraduate students in higher education are engaging in online group discussions as part of their course work, there is a need to gain insights into the nature of the experience of learning in this new context. Previous studies have reported benefits for students who engaged in online discussions, but few describe these benefits within a theoretical framework. This paper describes the results of a study of engineers enrolled in a distance course in which they "designed" an automatic vehicle. The course can be described as blended, as there were both online and face-to-­face sessions. The study analysed asynchronous group discussions, which constituted the communication mode for an optional collaborative project. The goal of the collaborative project was to create a specification for an automatic driving system. In keeping with a phenomenographic methodology, the analysis focused on seeking themes that emerged from the online discussions for the group as a whole and creating categories that represented these themes.