International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education
Call for papers: Special Issue on Intelligent Textbooks
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https://www.springer.com/journal/40593/updates/23312848

Motivation & Scope
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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 these days have digital versions and can be accessed online. Plenty of textbooks (and similar instructional texts, such as tutorials) are freely available as open educational resources (OERs). Many commercial textbooks come with libraries of supplementary educational resources or even distributed as parts of online educational services built on top of them. 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 and more.
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 one facilitate the access to textbooks and improve the reading process?
• How can one process textbook content to infer knowledge underlying the text and use it to improve learning support?
• How can one process increasingly more detailed logs of students interacting with digital textbooks and extract insights on learning?
• How can one find and retrieve relevant content “in the wild”, i.e., on the web, that can enrich the textbooks?
• How can one better understand both textbooks and student behaviors as they learn within the textbook and create personalized learner experiences?
This Special Issue will seek research contributions addressing these and other research questions related to the idea of intelligent textbooks. While the pioneer work on various kinds of intelligent textbook technologies has already begun, research in this area is still rare and spread over several different fields, including AI, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems, educational data mining, and user modeling. This Special Issue aims at bringing together researchers working on different aspects of intelligent textbook technologies in these fields and beyond to establish intelligent textbooks as a new, interdisciplinary research field.

List of Topics
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The themes of this Special Issue include but are not limited to:
• Modeling and representation of textbooks: examining the prerequisite and the semantic structure of textbooks to enhance their readability;
• Analysis and mining of textbook usage logs: analyzing the patterns of learners’ use of textbooks to obtain insights on learning and the pedagogical value of textbook content;
• Generation, manipulation, and presentation: exploring and testing different formats and forms of textbook content to find the most effective means of presenting different knowledge;
• Assessment and personalization: developing methods that can generate assessments and enhance textbooks with adaptive navigation support to meet the needs of every learner using the textbook;
• Knowledge visualization: augmenting textbooks with concept maps, open learner models and other knowledge-rich extensions
• Collaborative technologies: building and deploying social components of digital textbooks that enable learners to interact with not only content but other learners;
• Smart interactive content: extending online textbooks with various kinds of smart interactive content to improve learning, engagement, learner modeling, and personalization
• Intelligent information retrieval, content indexing and search, question answering, and question generation for digital textbooks
• Content curation and enrichment: sorting through external resources on the web and finding the relevant resources to augment the textbook and provide additional information for learners.

Timeline
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This submission process for the Special Issue will be organized in two phases. First, the authors should submit an extended abstract (up to 1000 words) by email to s.a.sosnovsky@uu.nl. The abstracts will be reviewed by the Guest Editors. Then, authors of accepted abstracts will be invited to submit a full paper that will undergo a regular review process."
• Extended abstract submission (up to 1000 words): November 15 2022
• Editorial decision on the extended abstract: December 13 2022
• Accepted paper submission: February 20 2023
• 1st round of reviews: April 10 2023
• 2nd version submission: May 08 2023
• 2nd round of reviews (If needed): June 05 2023
• Camera-ready versions: July 03 2023

Guest Editors
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Sergey Sosnovsky, Utrecht University, Netherlands (s.a.sosnovsky@uu.nl)
Peter Brusilovsky, University of Pittsburgh, USA (peterb@pitt.edu)
Andrew Lan, University of Massachusetts Amherst (andrewlan@cs.umass.edu)