My university was one of the pioneers in self directed learning.

It was during the black death when there was a shortage of lecturers and many students wanted to go away from the city to learn remotely in their own homes

So they came up with these portable reading tablets, a sort of p-book, which contained the lecturers words and could be read anywhere, even in bright sunlight. Eventually large stores of these were collected together in data repositories- a bit like tape libraries but with human robots.

- they also invented exams when they realised it was cheaper to examine a 100 students at once and outsource the marking than have the professor viva each student individually.