Abstract: In this paper, we described Scholarly Conversation, an online collaborative project designed for knowledge building in the two iterations of an online graduate course at a public, comprehensive university The instructional design approaches were similar in the 2016 and 2017 classes, except that a few features were added to explicitly facilitate knowledge building in the 2017 class Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from two teams identified from the two class Results show that the 2017 team demonstrated better performance in Scholarly Conversation than the 2016 team The findings have implications for instructional design for collaborative learning in an online environment