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Table 12 PUWL institutional analysis—Theme 2

From: Engineering student experience and self-direction in implementations of blended learning: a cross-institutional analysis

PUWL Theme 2

and sub-themes

Representative quotations

Variety in resources as a facilitator of learning

s = 10

“I would say it gives me a lot more opportunity to check my full understanding, rather than just check to see if my answer is correct. Because sometimes you can get in the middle of a problem and not realize that you are making assumptions that you're making, or not realize why an equation is the way that it is. And so, it's helped me more fully understand things, between both the videos with [the professor] explaining it. And also the blog because people will bring up things that I didn't think about.” (PUWL: Student 7)

Utility of having multiple sources of information

s = 10

“…it's a lot better because it gives you a variety of ways to understand the material, versus going [online] and I might find something that's not totally correct or not totally the way they want us to do it, or [not] something you need to learn for class. So, having that focused idea in a bunch of different varieties of [resources] helps a lot.” (PUWL: Student 2)

Prevents the need for students to “blend” the class on their own

s = 7

“…if I don't understand something [in another class], I'll have to go online and find out on my own. You know, just looking up random YouTube videos, and then sometimes you find something really good, sometimes you don't… with these online resources, because they were published by the professors, we know that they're going to be good and useful and relevant to what we're doing in the class” (PUWL: Student 4)

Learning how to learn takes time

s = 7

“I've invested probably more time in this class than any class this semester, and it's really helped me perfect my studying skills that I've learned to develop in the past but now I understand more—what I need to do to prepare for something or how I learn, or the amount of effort I put into something, which can be applied to any other class or project I'm working on.” (PUWL: Student 8)