Since the advent of the 21st century, digital technologies represented by artificial intelligence (AI), Big Data, and virtual reality (VR) are reshaping the educational ecosystem at an unprecedented pace. In parallel, research on digital education worldwide has also seen explosive growth. According to Digital Education Fronts 2025 (Project Team of Digital Education Fronts, 2025), from 2019 to 2024, the global academic output in the field of digital education has averaged over 8,000 publications annually, with more than 10,000 papers published in both 2021 and 2022 alone. However, behind this rapid development lie challenges. The percentage of high-impact papers has declined from 17.22% in 2020 to 11.17% in 2024, pointing to a shortage of breakthrough studies and an urgent need for stronger cross-regional collaboration. Additionally, issues such as regional development imbalances, technological ethical risks, and the digital literacy gap among educators have become bottlenecks hindering the inclusive and sustainable development of digital education.
Against this complex backdrop—marked by concurrent “growth and perplexity”—the report Digital Education Fronts 2025 (Project Team of Digital Education Fronts, 2025) underscores its profound practical salience. The expert team behind the report, guided by the principles of “grasping cutting-edge trends, guiding academic discourse, and informing policy and practice,” has drawn from a multidisciplinary foundation that includes library and information science, education, and AI to create a “data mining–cluster analysis–expert evaluation” research framework. This framework aims to distill core issues from a vast body of literature, providing a reference that is both theoretically robust and practically valuable for academic researchers and education practitioners.
1 Academic Value: Highlighting the Dual Significance of Digital Education Research
Amid the global wave of education digitalization, the research focuses on a central question of our time: “Where is education heading in the digital age?” With a forward-looking research perspective and a systematic analytical framework, the research captures the key trajectories of digital education development. It addresses core issues such as innovation in teaching models, the advancement of fairness in education, the establishment of ethical norms, and the restructuring of development systems, thereby building a comprehensive theoretical and practical system that responds to the educational transformation of the digital age. The research systematically reveals the intrinsic mechanisms and actionable pathways through which digital technologies enable educational transformation. The academic value of Digital Education Fronts 2025 lies not only in its strategic support for China’s education modernization but also in highlighting its role in driving the innovative development of global digital education on a worldwide scale.
1.1 National Significance: Serving China’s Education Modernization
The Digital Education Fronts 2025 is grounded in the overarching strategic vision of China’s education modernization. It aligns with the core imperative of digital transformation in higher education and centers on the deep integration of technology and educational innovation. By leveraging intelligent technology to drive systemic changes in the educational ecosystem, the research offers strategic solutions to break through bottlenecks in high-quality educational development and to support China’s goals of becoming a leading country in both education and talent.
The research aligns with the goal of education modernization by constructing an innovation paradigm driven by technology. Adhering to the core imperative of digital transformation in education, the research integrates cutting-edge technologies such as generative AI and smart learning spaces into educational practice. This forms an innovation paradigm for the technology-driven transformation of education, resonating with the goal outlined in China’s Education Modernization 2035 (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China & State Council, 2019) to “build an intelligent education system.” The research offers technological solutions to issues such as the homogenization of higher education and the scarcity of practical teaching resources.
The research addresses bottlenecks hindering high-quality educational development and aims to improve talent training systems. Taking the “learner capability growth graph” as a pivotal tool for personalized education, and through multi-modal data fusion technology, the research enables precise modeling of students’ cognitive trajectories, facilitating the deep integration of large-scale education and personalized cultivation while supporting the development of top-notch talent with both innovative thinking and practical skills. Moreover, the research also focuses on enhancing teachers’ digital literacy by reshaping competency evaluation and development models within intelligent teaching environments, thereby igniting intrinsic motivation for teachers’ professional advancement.
The research fortifies the safety baseline for educational innovation by optimizing digital governance systems. Regarding ethical regulation as the “safety net” for the development of digital education, the research proposes a strengthened ethical regulatory framework for technology application. This framework, through clearly defined rights and responsibilities, enhanced privacy protection, and transparent regulation of algorithms, forms a safety net for educational innovation.
1.2 Global Significance: Supporting the Innovation-Driven Development of Digital Education Worldwide
Digital Education Fronts 2025 addresses the common demands for global digital education development, revealing the underlying logic and practical framework of how intelligent technologies drive educational transformation. It offers theoretical frameworks to address challenges in the global digital transformation of education.
The research unveils the evolving patterns of deep interaction between education and technology, offering theoretical references for global educational transformation in the digital civilization era. By establishing a universal model for evaluating digital education quality, it provides a systematic solution to structural challenges such as disparate technical standards and insufficient cultural adaptation in traditional educational collaboration. This contributes to creating scalable practical paradigms for narrowing the digital divide and promoting educational equity.
The research advances innovation in global education governance and fosters multi-stakeholder collaboration. It translates universal research findings into an open collaboration paradigm, facilitating the exchange of ideas, the reciprocal learning of technologies, and the joint development of standards in international education cooperation. This approach not only fosters synergy between China’s smart education solutions and global best practices, but also accelerates the global reallocation of knowledge production resources through data sharing and mutual institutional recognition, ultimately forming an educational development ecosystem that is driven by multi-stakeholder collaborative innovation.
The research pioneers a cross-cultural talent training paradigm, highlighting the academic responsibility of Chinese education researchers. Focusing on the core demands for innovative talent to address global challenges, the research delves into the mechanisms of knowledge production and capacity building in cross-cultural talent training under the human–machine collaborative education model. It demonstrates the academic responsibility of Chinese education researchers in areas such as educational philosophy innovation, joint formulation of technology ethics, and collaborative digital governance, offering forward-looking and practically viable solutions for global educational transformation in the digital civilization era.
2 Practical Significance: Enabling Multidimensional Breakthroughs in Digital Education Practice
Digital Education Fronts 2025 serves not only as a phased summary of global digital education development but also as a forward-looking blueprint for education digitalization strategies for the next five to ten years. In this era of deep integration between digital technology and education, it is imperative to construct a new model of digital education that emphasizes openness, inclusivity, humanistic care, and technological ethics. By transforming China’s practical education experience into universally applicable solutions, the research offers Chinese wisdom and approaches to address shared global challenges—such as educational disruption and value conflicts arising from technological change—ultimately striving toward the vision of “making digital education equally accessible to all.”
2.1 Providing Strategic Decision-Making Support for Policymakers
The report’s forecasting on the top 10 global trends offers a “roadmap” for countries to formulate their digital education strategies. For instance, in response to the issue of “Digital Education Bridging Regional Gaps in the Balanced Development,” the report proposes solutions such as “building an integrated cloud-terminal smart learning ecosystem” and “promoting the intelligent transformation of teacher development,” directly tackling critical challenges—such as weak infrastructure and scarce high-quality resources—in developing countries. These proposals align closely with China’s ongoing initiatives, such as the establishment of the “Smart Education of China,” providing a theoretical basis for policy implementation. On the ethical governance front, the report’s focus on “ethical norms for digital education” is highly relevant to current realities. With the widespread adoption of AI technologies, issues such as algorithmic bias, data privacy, and academic integrity are becoming increasingly prominent. The report puts forward actionable recommendations, such as “establishing ethical review algorithms that covers the entire chain of data collection, generation, and application” and “building a collaborative governance mechanism based on rights-responsibility parity”. These recommendations offer an operational framework for national ethical guidelines.
2.2 Opening New Academic Frontiers for Education Researchers
For education researchers, the top 10 global trends in digital education identified in the report represent crucial key focal points for academic innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration. The “Human–AI Collaboration Reshaping Digital Education Ecosystem” integrates knowledge from multiple disciplines, including cognitive science, AI, and education. Research areas such as “developing intelligent teaching tools” and “constructing hybrid virtual–physical education environments” offer scholars a diverse array of research topics, ranging from technology development to pedagogical application. The study of “enhancing teachers’ digital literacy” highlights the fusion of humanistic care and technological innovation.
2.3 Providing Practical Solutions for Education Practitioners
At the educational practice level, the issues and solutions proposed in the report demonstrate strong feasibility and applicability. In the realm of “smart learning paradigms,” studies on “low cognitive load VR teaching platforms” and “multi-sensory interactive learning systems” have already been applied in experimental teaching at some universities. The study of “Vocational Education Aligning with Smart Technology-Driven Innovation Demands” directly addresses the disconnect between industrial upgrading and talent training. Recommendations such as “building bidirectional knowledge-integrated curricula connecting teaching and professions” and “developing virtual simulation training systems” fully demonstrate the practical value of digital technology in empowering vocational education.
2.4 Contributing Chinese Wisdom to Global Education Governance
As a comprehensive English-language journal on digital education in China, Frontiers of Digital Education is constructing a digital education discourse system with Chinese characteristics through the publication of this report. Research into cutting-edge areas such as “Generative AI Accelerating Interdisciplinary Integration” and “Data Driving Intelligent Decision-Making Across the Entire Teaching Process” draws on leading international practices while incorporating China’s practical achievements in educational Big Data and intelligent education platforms, showcasing the unique value of the “Chinese approach.” At the international level, studies of “Digital Education Bridging Regional Gaps in the Balanced Development” and “Global Co-Governance Redefining Ethical Boundaries in Digital Education” align with UNESCO’s advocacy for “education as a global public good,” contributing to more equitable and inclusive global education governance.
In conclusion, Digital Education Fronts 2025 represents a paradigm-shifting contribution to the discourse on education modernization in the digital age. By synthesizing multidisciplinary insights, it not only addresses the urgent challenges of technological integration, equity, and ethical governance in education but also proposes actionable frameworks to bridge theoretical innovation and practical implementation. Its dual focus on China’s strategic goals and global imperatives underscores the transformative potential of digital education as both a national priority and a shared human endeavor. As the field continues to evolve, this research serves as a foundational reference for fostering inclusive, ethical, and sustainable educational ecosystems—offering a forward-looking vision that harmonizes technological advancement with humanity’s collective aspirations for equitable knowledge production and lifelong learning.
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