Just as a classroom instructor needs to work to create an atmosphere in which students participate in class discussion, it takes effort to establish the student behavior of participating in online discussions. The "Communication guidelines" section outline starts you out with some habits which you may choose to establish early in the course.

There are many ways of keeping track of what students have discussed - manual and automatic. Some instructors check discussions frequently, perhaps every day or more, in order to keep abreast of what students are saying. Certain LMSs can give instructors automatic updates of new posts or count each student's number of posts, particularly useful for large classes. The additional help of automated systems can identify students who are reticent in participating so that corrective actions may be taken early in the course.