The present study reports on a collaborative writing project initiated and completed by 18 Iranian Englishlanguage learners enrolled in an online writing course. Using a wiki as the core element of the project, theaim of the course was fostering learner autonomy in online settings based on the collaborative autonomouslanguage learning framework proposed by Kessler and Bikowski (2010). The outcome of collaborativewriting project was a text created in a wiki, which was manually analyzed from the very beginning ofwriting to the final revisions and reflections to find autonomous alterations made by student writers. Thefindings of the study revealed student-writers’ autonomous contributions in the form of alterations to thetext which were accomplished interdependently with peers through alterations such as commenting as aninstance of scaffolding to reach a shared goal. Other types of autonomous alterations such as adding newinformation; deleting existing information; correction of information; clarification; synthesis; and reflection wereobserved in the final product. Frequent occurrence of peer correction with regard to content and form wasa discriminating finding of the current study. Also, despite the initial goal which was completion of theproject exclusively by learners, teacher intervention was witnessed throughout the process. To study the roleof teacher in depth, a semi-structured interview about the roles of a teacher in a collaborative autonomouslearning was conducted. The data from the interview went through a manual thematic analysis to find thethemes related to the learners’ perceptions of teacher’s roles. The findings revealed a need for a teacher as afacilitator and resource, which highlighted students’ demands for motivation and content knowledge fromteacher in an autonomous contribution to completing a collaborative project.