Although using specific guidelines to structure course participation in online courses can boost learner engagement, research suggests that learners' overreliance on these standards can lead to superficial participation. As a result, alternative methods for participation assessment, such as ungrading or self-assessment, are increasingly being explored. Using a self-regulated learning lens, this ethnographic case study investigated how graduate students navigated participation self-assessment in an online advanced instructional design (ID) theory course. Results suggest that participation represented a unique construct across learners who did not always embrace technology affordances to support their learning and struggled to lead the monitoring process for their participation. Additionally, learners created goals that were incomplete and did not demonstrate an explicit awareness of the connections between course participation and learning. Implications for creating an effective ungraded approach for course participation in online settings are discussed.