In order to adapt to the rapid development trend of the digital art industry, explore reform paths for digital art education, and deepen the industry-education integration talent training model, on October 17, 2026, the 9th National Digital Creative Teaching Skills Competition and the academic conference on "Digital Art Teaching Skills Iteration and Curriculum Reconstruction under Industry Demand Orientation" were successfully held at the Small Auditorium of Jiangsu University. This conference was jointly organized by the National Digital Creative Teaching Skills Competition Organizing Committee and Jiangsu University, and hosted by the School of Design and Art of Jiangsu University. Zhu Zhe, Vice Dean of the School of Design and Art of Jiangsu University, served as the host of this conference. Experts from universities within and outside the province, as well as representatives from industry enterprises, gathered together to conduct in-depth discussions on digital art education reform.
Currently, as artificial intelligence and industrial digital transformation continue to deepen, digital art education is ushering in new opportunities and challenges. The conference invited several academic experts and industry frontline representatives to deliver keynote reports, sharing cutting-edge theoretical achievements and teaching practice experiences.
Gao Yun, Associate Dean, Professor, and Master's Supervisor at the School of Fine Arts, Zhengzhou University, as well as an academic and technical leader of the Henan Provincial Department of Education and a young key teacher in Henan Province, shares insights on empowering social aesthetic education and promoting civilized trends, taking value positioning, interdisciplinary integration, local practice, and collaborative paths as entry points. By combining typical practical cases such as campus HIV prevention, the “Four Major Huai Medicines” art scroll, and popular science exhibitions in public venues, she explains the methods of transforming social reality issues into interdisciplinary teaching tasks, pointing out that long-term collaboration among courses, studios, and local entities is key to effectively implementing popular science aesthetic education. This provides new ideas for expanding the social service functions of digital art and advancing innovation in aesthetic education practice.
Yao Jin, Associate Dean and Professor at the School of Packaging Design and Art of Hunan University of Technology, a young backbone teacher in Hunan Province, and an executive member of the Packaging Education Professional Committee of the China Packaging Federation, focuses on industry changes in the digital era and deeply analyzes the opportunities and challenges faced by design education. He proposed that in the AI era, the cultivation of design talents should break free from the limitations of single software skill training and emphasize the comprehensive abilities of students in demand insight, system integration, value judgment, and project implementation. He also explored the implementation path of industry-academia-research collaborative education that meets industry development needs through the 'Design + X' interdisciplinary model, dual tutors from university and enterprises, real projects integrated into courses, and an integrated construction of 'learning, practice, competition, research, application, and evaluation'.
Xie Qingfeng, founder and secretary-general of the China Good Creativity and National Digital Art Design Competition and National Digital Creative Teaching Skills Competition, secretary-general of the Digital Imaging Creative Work Committee of the China Electronic Video Industry Association, and a national professional degree evaluation expert at the Degree Center of the Ministry of Education, interprets the core of digital art creativity from a cultural and belief perspective. He emphasizes that cultural confidence and humanistic value judgments are fundamental to generating creativity. Using rich examples from competitions, he introduces ways to integrate competitions with teaching, analyzes how competition topics and industry standards feedback into classroom teaching, and suggests that digital art education should both uphold local cultural roots and actively respond to the real development needs of the industry.
Wei Zhe, General Manager of the Education Division at Beijing Zhongke Dayang Technology Development Co., Ltd., an industry mentor for multiple universities, and Deputy Director of the Editorial Committee for the Generation Artificial Intelligence Series Textbooks for Ordinary Higher Education during the '15th Five-Year Plan', together with Zhao Yu, the company's AIGC Product Manager, post-production product application expert, and senior non-linear editing training lecturer, based on the real production processes of the media industry and combined with practical cases of AIGC technology implementation, provides a complete demonstration of the integrated workflow from topic planning, AI content generation, dubbing, and editing to final output. They introduce the practical value of AIGC technology in diverse teaching scenarios such as news production, historical material revitalization, and intangible cultural heritage popular science, bridging the gap between cutting-edge industry technology and university classroom teaching.
The entire academic conference had a clear theme, combining theoretical depth with practical value. The participants fully exchanged and debated around hot topics such as AI-enabled teaching, industry-education collaborative innovation, competition-teaching integration, and the reconstruction of the digital art curriculum system. Experts at the conference believed that the transformation of digital creative education is not just an update at the tool level, but also involves a systematic reconstruction of talent cultivation concepts, curriculum systems, and collaborative mechanisms. This conference established a high-quality platform for dialogue and communication between universities and industry, clarified the direction of digital art education reform under the guidance of industry needs, and holds positive significance for promoting the iterative upgrading of digital art courses and building a comprehensive digital creative talent cultivation system. Jiangsu University will also take this conference as an opportunity to continuously deepen digital art teaching reform, advance the in-depth integration of industry, academia, and research, and support the cultivation of high-quality talent in the field of digital creativity.
