International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education (2025)
DOI: 10.1007/s40593-024-00451-9
Introduction
Intelligent textbooks of the fifth generation seek to utilize new capabilities provided by generative AI systems. The range of problems addressed and methods employed is vast: from new ways to generate assessment material to new dialog-based interfaces to attempts to generate the content of textbooks themselves. Source: 10.1007/s40593-024-00451-9
Textbooks remain one of the main methods of instruction, but—just like other educational tools—they have been evolving over the last several decades in many aspects (how they are created, published, formatted, accessed, and maintained). Most textbooks today have digital versions and can be accessed online. A large number of textbooks (and other structured instructional texts, such as tutorials) are freely available as open educational resources (e.g., Baraniuk et al., 2017). Many textbooks come with libraries of supplementary educational resources (Ericson & Miller, 2020; Gordon et al., 2021) or even distributed as parts of online educational services built on top of them (Ritter et al., 2019). The transition of textbooks from printed copies to digital and online formats has facilitated numerous attempts to enrich them with various kinds of interactive functionalities including search and annotation, interactive content modules, automated assessments, question ans, chatbots, etc.
As a result of these enrichments, new research challenges and opportunities emerge that call for the application of artificial intelligence (AI) methods to enhance digital textbooks and learners’ interaction with them. There are many research questions associated with this new area of research; examples include:
How can we facilitate access to textbooks and improve the reading process?
How can we process textbook content to infer knowledge underlying the text and use it to improve learning support?
How can we process increasingly more detailed logs of students interacting with digital textbooks and extract insights on learning?
How can we find and retrieve relevant content “in the wild”, i.e., on the web, that can enrich the textbooks?
How can we leverage advanced language technology, such as chatbots, to make textbooks more interactive?
How can we better understand both textbooks and student behaviors as they learn within the textbook and create personalized learner experiences?
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area.
He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit.
Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.
