So as time went on the number of people submitting homework has declined. But surfing through the tracking statistics revealed some interesting things:

• There was very little correlation between the quantity of participation and quality of the person's work. Some may have been efficient readers, and others may have meandered around the site. So just like web server logs these figures are like reading bones.
  
• Interestingly there was one guy who was very active in discussions at the beginning but then stopped talking and didn't do the homework. BUT...he was still logging on through the last day of class. That tells me people want different things from the class, and that he probably wanted to learn and wasn't interested in proving to anyone else what he could (probably) do.