Challenges and Opportunities of Civic Education in Colleges and Universities in Digital Environment

Civic education in colleges and universities plays a pivotal role in fostering students' national identity and civic responsibilities. Enhanced by digital learning environments, it promises to cultivate exemplary citizens more effectively. This paper details the development of a MOOC interactive communication platform utilizing the open-source edX framework, which serves to enhance civic education. It delves into optimizing resource storage technologies on the platform. It introduces an innovative assignment mutual evaluation algorithm tailored for Civics and Political Science education, which accounts for rater bias and scoring patterns. The newly implemented resource storage and mutual assessment algorithms have notably improved the functionality of the civic education platform. Performance metrics from the platform indicate an encouraging trend in student achievement across three courses, with average scores of 78.32, 79.24, and 83.27, respectively, showcasing a consistent upward trajectory. Further analysis reveals a converging trend in the variance of data distribution, indicating a reduction in disparities in student learning outcomes as evidenced by a decrease in standard deviation values. Comprehensively, students' overall test scores have shown significant improvement. Notably, mastery of subject matter knowledge saw an increase from 2.3% to 21.4%, and the pass rate escalated from 92.6% to 98.3%. Although there were initial discrepancies in the cognitive rating of civic education values between the experimental and control groups, the experimental group exhibited substantial gains, underscoring the efficacy of the platform and its methodologies. © 2024 Xingli Zhang., published by Sciendo.