Abstract
The purpose of this research was to explore two discourse types that students deploy developing online collaborative tasks: cognitive discourse, focuses on knowledge construction, and regulatory discourse, focuses on the control of the collaborative process. A multiple case study was conducted with six groups of undergraduate students, they developed collaborative tasks through asynchronous communication forums among four weeks. The results highlight that regulatory discourse on explicit positive expectations about the academic task, the monitoring of the task contents and the socio-emotional support among the participants promote the presence of an argumentative, deep and proactive dialogue of the thematic contents. A positive effect of the regulatory discourse deployed by students on the knowledge developed by them is concluded.