The paper discusses the features of self-study at HEIs in the context of distance learning. Self-study at HEIs embraces a variety of types of work like doing homework, studying learning material, doing individual assignments, preparing term papers, projects, reports, abstracts, essays, project work, participating in subject olympiads, competitions, research papers and many others. Student self-study activities are quite diverse and can be focused not only on the reproduction of knowledge acquired, but also on the creativity of students. Moreover, they are mainly geared towards strengthening independent and individualized learning, currently dominated by the development of distance learning. Distance education today is the most progressive and rapidly evolving in the learning process, including higher education. Rather than promoting the acquisition of content-rich knowledge, higher education is tasked to shape productive thinking of students, develop the intellectual potential of a person capable of selfeducation and self-organization in the context of future complex professional activities. Distance learning to enable student self-study is viewed as a pattern of student self-study based on information and communication technologies enabling to communicate, receive and transfer knowledge, tasks remotely via the Internet. Distance learning can be effectively implemented in the process of student self-study activities under certain pedagogical conditions. It demonstrates certain unique features, and calls for flexible and updated pedagogical methods. The paper provides an empirical study that made it possible to identify the main problems and difficulties among university students being involved in extracurricular self-study activities.