Information and communication technologies have increasingly been integrated in our everyday lives, and as many would say changed how we acquire knowledge and how we learn. It is against such a background this paper will describe how higher education students engage with technology during self-studies and how they in particular utilize different semiotic affordances of information and communication technologies in order to learn course content. Consequently, focus is put on how university students design their learning during self-studies through exploiting multimodal literacy and by constructing knowledge through different modes and media. The paper reports on a mixed-method study and presents findings that points to that (1) students are becoming active designers of learning due to access to new modes and media that can be tailored to their needs, (2) that students have developed a multimodal digital literacy to various degrees, and (3) that students are provided opportunities for enhanced and more effective learning than before because of the availability of affordances of contemporary technology. Thus the paper calls for a pedagogical shift that take departure from a design-oriented, multimodal understanding of learning.