First-year university students in an engineering course experienced activities which required them to engage in learning back and forth across physical and virtual learning space. The lecturer had designed a campus-based course with a significant online component involving activities for preparing the class, for use during class and for reflecting on classes afterward. Despite being required to engage deeply, not all students experienced the blended learning activities in the same way. While some reported deep approaches to the experience, perceived the in-class and online experiences as an integrated whole and collaborated in appropriate ways, others reported surface approaches, fragmented conceptions and collaboration patterns which did not support their learning outcomes . Combining research methodologies from student approaches to learning research and social network analysis , this study reveals qualitative variation in the learning experience which is logically related to academic achievement. The results offer implications for effective teaching in blended environments and ideas for how virtual learning space should be designed in order to be integrated effectively into course design.