The research method involved students and staff in a constructivist grounded research approach (Charmaz, 2005). In practice this study involved individual interviews with students on two occasions as well as two focus groups and two individual interviews with the staff. The students were interviewed by phone for half an hour after five weeks in the online programme and again at the end of the six-month programme. The premise was that the first interviews would generate themes for analysis and coding that could, additionally, inform the approach for the second interviews. Students were prepared for online study through a series of tasks that together constituted a non-assessed orientation course. In preparation for the online discussion forum students were shown how to make an entry and how to follow discussions on the forum pages. The nature of the student preparation was to ensure that the learning platform that they were to use was well understood and that they had some experience of exchanging information about themselves in the forum prior to the course commencing. This warm-up period, similar to the first two stages in Salmon’s model (2000), lasted for three weeks, with online and telephone support being offered to the students as well as a designated member of staff acting as course moderator. The discussion forums lasted for the duration of each course, which was up to a month. The exception was the research course, which lasted for the whole of the six months. The expectation was that students would make at least two postings for each course, and while many did far more, some were unable to keep up with even two postings towards the end of the course. The staff attended a pre-commencement series of workshops, which were video-recorded and reported on as part of the study. These workshops once again focused on gaining a good understanding of the tools provided. These included how staff could gain access to the students’ online discussion forum, add anything to that forum, and access online assignments, mark, and return those assignments online.