Participation and sense of belonging are important to student success. As the number of students involved in distance education increases, existing methods of communicating in distance education programs should be examined to ensure that all students feel comfortable participating in class discussions. We studied class participation in a fully online and accredited Computer Science Masters program that serves over 4,000 students. The primary means of course participation in this program is an online forum called Piazza. In this paper we investigated Piazza usage across different subgroups in a 2017 course, as well as self-reported usage and experiences with the Piazza tool. Findings show that female students posted statistically significant fewer words per post as compared to male students. Overall, female students posted at a lower rate than male students in every category of post data analyzed. Few significant differences were found between posting activity of students working in IT and those working outside of IT. Self-reported data showed a variety of attitudes towards and experiences with the Piazza forum. Some students highly value the forum, others find it too 'chaotic' to effectively use, several commented that the usefulness of the forum varies greatly by course, and almost a third of survey respondents reported feeling personally disrespected or offended by another student's post on at least one occasion.