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As blended learning pedagogy gains an increasing popularity in higher education, there is a need to continually report both students’ and instructors’ perceptions regarding blended learning in order to generate better learning outcomes. This paper examines how students and instructors perceived the incorporation of MOOCs in students’ blended learning experience and the challenges they encountered. A total of 122 second-year undergraduates enrolling in an English course were surveyed, and five students and three lecturers were interviewed. The finding shows that students had favorable attitudes toward this blended course, expressing a higher level of interaction, flexibility, a better understanding of the learning content, and a richer learning experience. The instructors confirmed the positive impacts of blended learning but also admitted blended teaching increased their time commitment to their jobs. The impediments met by students and instructors in the blended learning environment must be taken into consideration.

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This paper explores the relationship between girls' schooling and empowerment in western China in the first decade of the 21st century. This paper adopted a capability-empowerment framework based on Sen's capability approach into which were integrated concepts by Bourdieu, Appadurai, Nussbaum, Kabeer, and Unterhalter, to help to understand the tenacity with which village girls pursued schooling. In interviews with a group of 23 girls and young women, several valued functionings of intrinsic capability sets in the freedom dimensions of well-being and agency and their association with rising levels of school attainment were found. The girls were found to be gaining empowering capabilities through schooling, but that these were not equally distributed, neatly slicing the group into two sharply defined groups with different life paths. One set dropped out in the middle school years with a smaller set of empowerment capabilities to work in low-skilled jobs in cities, which offered them new places to change. The other set remained in school longer to achieve a larger set of empowering functionings that they converted into more substantive freedoms in a variety of settings.