Wiki has a good definition of learning – Learning is acquiring new, or modifying and reinforcing existing, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, or preferences and may involve synthesizing different types of information. Most of that you have done in (1), and it is ‘active learning’ as you have chosen what you want to learn rather than being forced to learn it.
You have proven your learning (as you suggest) by all measures in (2) and are now, in fact, onto next ‘level’ by explaining your learning to others:
“if you can’t explain it simply you don’t understand it well enough” Albert Einstein
Your key dilemma seems to be gaining confidence to move on to the next ‘learning experience’, so you ‘feel’ like you have learnt. Does peer-to-peer feedback line this help?
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