Insights Gained from Integrating Self-Paced Learning into Digital Learning Environments
Authors: Englmeier Kurt 
Published: August 2024

Self-paced learning has emerged as a cornerstone of modern education, offering learners unprecedented flexibility and autonomy in their learner journeys. This paper focuses on the design paradigms and support mechanisms necessary to facilitate effective and sustainable learning experiences.The success of self-paced learning lies in its ability to empower learners to engage with course materials at their own pace, anytime and anywhere. This flexibility not only accommodates diverse learning styles and workplace and living circumstances but also fosters a sense of ownership and responsibility in learners. However, while self-paced learning holds immense promise, it also poses significant challenges, particularly in terms of managing learners' study efforts and ensuring the retention of knowledge over a long period of time.One of the first key considerations in designing self-paced learning environments is the structuring of course content. By breaking down complex topics into manageable chunks and leveraging tools such as large language models (LLMs) for dynamic text summarisation (and comparison), digital learning platforms strive to provide learners with clear and comprehensive overviews of the subject matter. These structured environments not only guide learners through their educational journeys but also facilitate the integration of new information with existing knowledge, fostering deeper understanding and retention.This paper presents a digital learning platform for self-paced learning that is already applied in the academic education. The main focus is on self-paced learning in structured learning environments that support the acquisition of comprehensive knowledge to learners that are usually new to the subject matter addressed in the course. Digital courses that allow learners to study autonomously need to take for the learners' metacognition, or their ability to monitor and regulate their learning processes. Metacognitive self-regulation strategies empower learners to monitor their progress and employ effective learning techniques. However, empirical evidence suggests that learners often struggle to accurately assess their own abilities (such as cramming for an exam), leading to suboptimal learning strategies. Managing learners' study efforts is another critical aspect of self-paced learning. Our digital learning platform employs strategies to measure and optimise study efforts, including setting minimum reading times, recommending study breaks, and assigning individual Learning Complexity Indices (LCIs) to course materials. A further challenge of digital courses is the learners’ development of an abstract representation of the knowledge provided by the course. The system must be in the position to allow learners the adoption of knowledge following the semantic wave. Learners continuously switch between from abstract to detailed representation of concepts. Deeper understanding of a concept emerges from recognising which and how many details connect to one particular abstract. The system presented in this paper supports the learners in adopting the semantic wave by enabling them to navigate the content by using their own words as search terms. This active use of the (conceptual) language helps the learners to build up their own mental representation of knowledge structure.The paper presents still work-in-progress, but manifest a strong proof-of-concept that considering semantic wave in the interaction design is an essential ingredient of digital learning environments.