The internationalization of higher education has brought students from different countries into direct contact with one another. One of the scenarios is intercultural communication among international students in an online environment mediated through institutional e-learning systems, for example, Moodle and Blackboard. In this paper, I analyze data from an Australian university course online discussion forums involving written communication among international students. I extend the notion of "metacultural competence" (Sharifian, 2013, pp. 8-9) and propose that international students should also develop "metacultural writing competence" for intercultural communication. I also explore the implications for university students and lecturers, who engage increasingly in intercultural communication through writing in English.