How can technology be best-harnessed to innovate pedagogical approaches to curriculum design and delivery in order to enhance university students’ learning experience? This article looks at this question from the English for Specific Purposes (ESP) perspective and reports on a number of technology-enabled interventions to the design and teaching methods used on a Science, Engineering and Technology (SET) pre-sessional course. Every summer the University of Glasgow (UK) runs an intensive ESP course for incoming international postgraduate students wanting to study SET-related disciplines. In previous years, in order to progress onto their Master’s or PhD programmes, the students had to produce a written assignment and an oral presentation which investigates an engineering problem of their choosing and a range of solutions. In August 2015 an online collaboration with a partner university in Palestine was piloted, which allowed several significant developments. During the project, 20 Palestinian students and 37 UK-based students, divided into small groups, worked together on authentic and highly contextualised SET-related scenarios from the Gaza Strip, devised by the Palestinian students. Their role was to act as critical friends, and provide content-oriented comments throughout the project, which they had been trained in on an intensive online preparatory course in constructive feedback. Based on the guidance from their peer mentors, the students in the UK analysed and evaluated possible solutions. At the end of the project, they delivered presentations to the audience in Gaza via a videoconference link. The course was
