The emotional participation of online learning is a process-oriented emotional indicator that measures learners' learning effects. Existing studies have shown there is little research on online-learning emotional participation, and even fewer have studied the online learning participation of ethnic college students. In order to study the online learning participation of ethnic college students, this paper tried to build the online-learning emotional participation theory model, which included four dimensions: learning interest, self-efficacy, self-worth and the sense of belonging. Based on the survey of 723 students from Yunnan Minzu University in China, we analysed the structural and quantitative relationships among the four dimensions of online-learning emotional participation of ethnic and Han college students respectively. The results show that there are significant differences in the online-learning emotional participation between ethnic and Han college students, especially their sense of belonging. Furthermore, in order to build a better online learning environment for ethnic college students and enhance their sense of belonging, an online learning community model is proposed.