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.