Varying mathematical skills, rising dropout rates, and growing numbers of first year students confront the universities with major organizational and pedagogical problems. In this chapter, the authors describe an innovative way of teaching and learning designed to improve this situation by bridging courses par- ticularly including self-diagnostic e-assessment and supporting self-regulated learning. The development of highly structured e-learning material has been and still is the most important objective. The material has been implemented, extended, evaluated, and improved since 2003. Our chapter refers to multime- dia learning material for bridging courses which was developed by the project “Multimediavorkurs Mathematik” in collaboration of research groups from the German Universities of Kassel and Paderborn and the Technical University Darmstadt.
For providing an overview of our whole bridging-course programme, at first we will discuss our ma- terial concerning content-related, didactical, and authoring aspects. Then we will discuss our course scenarios with regard to pedagogical and organisational aspects. Focusing on selected results of an accompanying evaluation study we will finally discuss the acceptance and success of our courses and highlight some interesting findings concerning our learners.