The move towards providing fully online and blended courses for university students is becoming almost universal. To maximize the benefit to students and organisations we need to develop a robust model that allows us to identify the needs of students. We propose that an ecological model, already found to be useful in complex educational settings, can be used to make sense of data gathered regarding the behaviour of online students. Using an example involving three courses at a large Australian University we show this model yields useful pointers to investigating these issues.