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The role of discussion forums is an essential part of online courses in tertiary education. Activities in discussion forums help learners to share and gain knowledge from each other. In fully online courses, discussion forums are often the only medium of interaction. However, merely setting up discussion forums does not ensure that learners interact with each other actively and investigation into the type of participation is required to ensure quality participation. This paper provides a general overview of how fully online students participate in discussion forums and the correlation between their activity online and achievement in terms of grades. The main benefit of this research is that it provides a benchmark for the trend of participation expected of the fully online introductory information technology and programming students. Investigating the participation and the factors behind online behaviour can provide guidelines for continual development of online learning systems. The results of the data analysis reveal that a high number of students are not accessing or posting in the discussion board. Results also show that there is a correlation between activity of students' in online forums and the grades they achieve. Discussion about the findings of data analysis and the lessons learned from this research are presented in this paper.