Well Designed Digital Textbooks–Users’ Requirements

Using the example of recent German digital geography textbooks, this chapter aims to analyze which attributes well designed digital textbooks should include to meet today’s users’ attitudes, skills, and learning requirements. In this context, the term user describes, firstly, students and secondly, teachers. The focus is on conceptual and media didactic thoughts, motivational aspects and visual design factors, whereas subject education considerations and subject content are not elaborated on in detail. In doing so, this chapter analyzes theoretical approaches concerning the conception and design of learning effective and motivating digital textbooks. In addition, this contribution discusses theoretical approaches relative to empirical findings according to today’s students’ digital literacy skills, learning motivation, and user behavior in the specific context of digital textbooks. The analysis revealed that although today’s students extensively utilize digital devices and value digital technologies, their digital and visual literacy skills are still limited, which demonstrates the need for more instruction in how to utilize digital tools more effectively for learning and problem-solving. Moreover, the conception and the design of today’s digital educational media should not merely focus on technical features, but on carefully elaborated didactic concepts. These are concepts that integrate subject content with the capabilities of digital technologies fostering besides subject-specific knowledge, twenty-first century skills, such as digital literacy, information literacy, critical thinking, problem-solving, powerful concepts of analyzing, explaining, and understanding complex issues and relationships, and effective strategies to acquire new knowledge. This excludes unmodified or solely digitally enriched adaptions of existing printed textbooks, but it requires the development of new concepts, meaningful synthesizing of pedagogy, structure, design, content, and technology tailored to learning-fostering and motivating digital educational media.