TY  - JOUR
AU  - HU, Jia-Kang
AU  - TANG, Cong
AU  - SANG, Guo-Yuan
PY  - 2026
TI  - Generative Artificial Intelligence Empowers Digital Textbook Design: Value Clarification, Risk Review and Path Exploration
JO  - Modern Educational Technology
SN  - 1009-8097
SP  - 46
EP  - 55
VL  - 36
IS  - 7
AB  - Against the background of the continuous advancement of national educational digitalization strategy, the forms, functions, and design concepts of digital textbooks are embracing new opportunities for development. With capabilities such as multi-modal content generation, semantic comprehension, human-computer interaction, and personalized learning support, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has the potential to overcome the limitations of traditional textbooks in content presentation, instructional support, and dynamic updating. On the basis of sorting out the developmental bottlenecks of digital textbooks, this paper elaborated on the empowering value of GenAI for digital textbook design from three dimensions: content organization, teaching implementation, and assessment support. Meanwhile, potential risks were identified from the perspectives of affective comprehension, process regulation, and structural presentation, including diminished emotional experience, reduced controllability of the learning process, and and undermined stability of knowledge architecture. For the design of digital textbooks, it should be adhere to the integration of educational attributes and technological attributes, prioritize learners’ emotional support and learning experience, facilitate effective collaboration among teachers, students, and intelligent technologies in teaching scenarios, and maintain logicality and orderliness of textbook frameworks in accordance with disciplinary knowledge systems. In practice, actionable strategies can be formulated covering content development, organizational mechanisms, and evaluation systems to foster a reliable standardized, dynamic and educationally meaningful intelligent digital textbook system. This research helped delineate the value boundaries and key risk points of GenAI’s involvement in digital textbook design, and provided references for the standardized development, classroom application and governance optimization of intelligent digital textbooks in future research and practice.
UR  - https://doi.org/10.3969/j.issn.1009-8097.2026.07.005
DO  - 10.3969/j.issn.1009-8097.2026.07.005