The Future of Education

Self-organized learning is an integral part of higher education. From preparatory reading to end-of-semester revision right before the exams, there are many learning processes that students need to plan—and carry out—by themselves. But this does not necessarily mean that no teachers are involved in these processes. By distributing strategically prepared learning materials through learning management systems (LMS), they can add instructional scaffolding to self-study, thus helping students plan and carry out their learning activities with greater ease. And when teachers are already providing recordings of their classes, improving this scaffolding may even turn out to be surprisingly easy.

Our article presents five ways in which teachers can support self-organized learning processes that involve audiovisual media (e.g., lecture recordings) by adding further information to the LMS they use for their courses. These suggestions are based on two qualitative studies from the HAnS project (Schmohl et al., 2023), which aims to create an intelligent assistance system (Hochschul-Assistenz-System) to support self-organized learning at German universities.

To begin, we give a brief overview of the HAnS project and the two exploratory studies upon which we draw for this article. The first, a series of interviews with students from different academic fields, was conducted in the summer of 2022 to gain insight into future HAnS users’ needs and wants. The second study, consisting of two group discussions, was conducted two years later, in the summer of 2024. Here, students from different academic fields were asked to first experiment with the current HAnS prototype and then discuss their ideas for the further development of the system.

Against this backdrop, we present the results of a comparative analysis of the two studies. In both, students expressed similar needs and ideas, especially regarding the information on courses they would like teachers to supply via HAnS. By turning the students’ suggestions into design ideas that can be applied to any given LMS, we aim to provide teachers in higher education with new ideas on how to improve scaffolding for self-study with audiovisual media.