A design based research strategy examining the impressions and behavior of members of courses taught entirely online is used for refining a context-aware activity notification system (CANS). The findings show that CANS must address substantial variety in courses and members while also fitting with multitasking between online and real world activities for the members. Two dimensions of online tools to support learning in a multitasking environment were identified: salience and meaningfulness. Salience is the tuning of awareness information to a particular technological and pedagogical context. Meaningfulness is achieved by ensuring that awareness data for a particular context align with the mental model of users receiving it. The design that emerged to support the diverse and multitasking nature of online learning includes reporter mechanisms customizing context awareness to the course, members, and pedagogical structures. (Contains 3 figures and 1 note.)