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This article explores the gap between expectations of faculty and students by focusing on defining the online "student". The author looks at practitioner interviews to identify "ways of talking" about students and Annemarie Mol's (2002; 1999) concept of enactment to understand who students are and how they behave in the interactive spaces of online learning. The author's argument is that understanding the category of "student" in multiple ways offers faculty a way to approach the "potentially disorienting spaces" (Bayne and Ross, 2007) of online teaching practices. Online learning presents a different environment of interaction and engagement for teaching and this article states that in order to be effective, teaching online students requires new strategies for engagement. Some of the strategies outline developing a community of learners, treating students as customers, and considering students in the context of their digital generation. This article is helpful for those who are teaching an online course or considering how to design an online offering. The author is a curriculum and academic developer for LaTrobe University in Australia.