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Together with the growth in the presence of e-learning in higher education institutions, the advance of technology allows for the possibility of creating tailored institutional strategies to improve the experience of their students. Moreover, placing the students at the centre of their learning in self-regulated environments also implies offering a more tailored experience that focuses in their learning styles. In order to do so, it is essential to distinguish the different student profiles that arise in these contexts from a meta-cognitive and motivational perspective. The current paper uses hierarchical clustering on a sample of students enrolled in distance education programmes at a medium-sized Spanish university to obtain a set of distinct profiles and show how this technique can be useful both to assess the needs and limitations of the students from the perspective of exogenous and intrinsic factors in TEL environments and to provide specific services for each of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]