Collaborative online international learning (COIL) represents a form of blended on-line and off-line learning in which students attending universities in different countries produce collaborative projects as part of their regular coursework. Given the highly distributed, technologically mediated interactions that are required for successful COIL collaboration, in this paper we consider the importance of recognizing how student competences routinely linked to intercultural skills and abilities are better formulated in terms of interactional competence. In addition, we briefly consider how such interactional competence can be approached as comprising a wide range of complex multimodal and epistemic interactional practices. As with the notion that the mere provision of study-abroad opportunities inevitably results in students acquiring intercultural competence, we argue that technologically mediated teaching and learning requires careful consideration of a range of constraints as well as the often-lauded affordances.