SUMMARY
The World Wide Web provides access to information and knowledge sources that are virtually unlimited. Convenience and interactivity allow and encourage people to use it to explore unfamiliar topics. Hypertext resources have become an important educational environment. It can offer new opportunities for structuring, presenting, adapting and integrating different teaching materials. The use of hypermedia technologies has made a breakthrough in the process of education and self-education, combining elements that are still united in a single whole. The domestic and foreign experience in the introduction of hypertext technologies in the educational process of higher education institutions was analyzed in the article. The study emphasized that the technology is an effective way to implement distance learning of a modern higher education institution, creating conditions for self-obtaining and qualitative assimilation of the necessary educational information that can be integrated into the educational process. Having analized the use of electronic teaching materials on the basis of hypertext and multimedia has clearly demonstrated the advantages of this technology in comparison with traditional textbooks, since it can reveal its didactic potential. Modern students cannot imagine their daily lives without the use of various digital devices such as personal computers, mobile phones, iPad and tablets, as they became the main source of information retrieval and storage. It was underlined that the main goal of teachers is to find ways and tools that allow them to maximize the potential of these devices to enhance the effectiveness of the learning process. Despite the potential of hypertext, which facilitated access to educational materials, self-study is often associated with many problems. In the process of independent study, students, guided by different points of view, can follow different navigation paths, and thus can be disoriented or cognitively overloaded because of the potential gap between what they need and what actually exists on the Internet.