Digital Textbooks and Their Development Trends

Digitization represents a more advanced stage in the integration of information technology, reshaping human production and lifestyles. The digital transformation entails reconstructing the digital education ecosystem. Textbooks are the most important carriers of teaching content and ideas and serve as crucial blueprints for instruction. They present several disadvantages, such as high costs, inconvenience in portability, monotonous content presentation, slow updates, difficulty in taking notes, challenges in tracking learners’ behaviors, and achieving personalized and targeted teaching. International Chinese language education involves students from various countries, spanning different time zones and spaces, with significant variations in study times, learning differences, economic levels, and developmental stages, making the drawbacks of traditional textbooks even more pronounced. Digital textbooks, with their convenience, interactivity, and personalization, can address many of these issues, thereby better facilitating the digital transformation of education. This is also a pressing issue to be addressed in the digital transformation process of international Chinese education. However, despite being around for many years, digital textbooks are still relatively new. People’s understanding of their concepts and standards remains limited. This paper reviews the development of digital textbooks to clarify their advantages and challenges and concludes with strategic recommendations to aid the construction of digital textbooks for international Chinese language education.