Okay -- while "You are bloody brilliant!" is a bit over the top the point here is that we, as online educators, must use every trick and educational strategy available to keep our students engaged, interested, and active in the course. If not the ugly word "attrition" comes into play, and it can hurt us by there not being enough students to have us teach a course. The Quiet students are the ones most likely to drop out, and we have to quickly prop them up -- they are like balloons that have come to our classes already partially deflated; our job is to inflate them. There are two major ways this can be done: getting the student to open up about some part of his / her life that relates to the subject of the course and pointing out this, that, and the other thing a student writes in discussion or does on an assignment that is good. Doing this latter one can go a long way to blowing up that balloon, for the student suddenly knows we like what he / she has to offer, and it builds up the student's confidence. I don't know how many hundreds of times I've seen this happen, but in 19 years of teaching online it is rare when telling a student an offshoot of "You are bloody brilliant!" does not work.