The design of online learning courses offered in a teacher education program and with post-graduate degrees in education varies greatly by course focus, instructor experience, and availability of suitable and accessible platform software. Many online course instructors include asynchronous topic-based discussions in their course expectations for students. However, it is an ongoing discussion among the online professorship as to ways they might encourage increased depth and thoughtful contributions to the online community’s learning by engaging in threaded online discussions. This paper provides and overview of a model for online learning, as derived from recent research and proposes a framework for examining two aspects of online discussion threads that may be posted by student participants. First, a framework is provided that might be given to online student participants to guide their contributions to the discussions. Second, a list of possible contents of online discussions is presented and suggestions are made for how the online professorship might use this list of possibilities to guide peer and self-evaluation of online contributions.