Wholly online presentation of courses is becoming increasingly common, but poor levels of student engagement pose challenges to institutions, instructors and students. In this paper, I explore the risks arising from those challenges using an analysis of the presentation of a wildlife management course as a model, comparing data about levels of student engagement with assessments of students, the instructor and the course. My findings are consistent with the assertion that, for this course, there were risks of poor grades for students and risks of poor student evaluations for the online instructor; risks that can be minimised using recent findings about the factors leading to poor engagement.