The fundamental task of higher education is to foster virtue through education, which is the primary principle that New Liberal Arts construction must always adhere to. Traditional economics and management teaching often takes professional knowledge teaching as the single core goal and ignores the shaping of students’ values, professional ethics, and sense of social responsibility. In the context of New Liberal Arts, talent training needs to realize the organic unity of knowledge impartment, ability cultivation, and value leadership.

Economics and management majors are closely related to social operation, market competition, enterprise operation, and resource allocation, and professional knowledge itself contains rich ideological and political elements such as business integrity, fair competition, legal compliance, green development, and public responsibility. The teaching and research reform must take curriculum ideological and political construction as the fundamental starting point, integrating socialist core values, modern business ethics, integrity management awareness, legal awareness, environmental protection concepts, and patriotic feelings into the whole process of professional teaching and practical training ([3]). It guides students to establish correct economic values, occupational values, and social values, restrain professional behaviors with moral norms, and cultivate high-quality economic management talents with political integrity, moral character, professional ability, and a sense of responsibility.

Interdisciplinary integration is the most distinctive core feature of New Liberal Arts construction. With the continuous complication of socio-economic problems, actual economic management activities are no longer limited to single-discipline professional knowledge. Modern enterprise operation, market analysis, financial risk control, supply chain management, and industrial economic research all need to comprehensively use multidisciplinary knowledge such as management, economics, statistics, computer science, law, sociology, and environmental science.

Traditional economics and management majors adopt a closed disciplinary setting and separate curriculum design, resulting in isolated knowledge systems among majors, which makes it difficult to adapt to the needs of complex economic and social governance. New Liberal Arts requires teaching and research reform to completely break the solidified boundary between single disciplines and majors, promote the cross integration of economics and management with information technology, big data technology, law, environmental science, and other disciplines, set up interdisciplinary comprehensive courses and frontier courses, and build an open and integrated curriculum system ([4]). Through interdisciplinary teaching, students’ divergent thinking, comprehensive analysis ability, and cross-field problem-solving ability are cultivated to adapt to the compound work needs of modern economic management posts.

New Liberal Arts construction emphasizes eliminating the disadvantages of traditional liberal arts education, which is divorced from social reality, and takes practical education and industry-university-research collaborative education as the key direction of reform. Economics and management are typical applied disciplines, and the effectiveness of talent training is ultimately tested by social practice and industrial application.

Under the new development background, the teaching and research reform of economics and management must take industrial demand as the orientation, closely focus on the actual posts and development trends of the industry, optimize the practical teaching system, expand the off-campus collaborative education platform, introduce enterprise real projects, industrial typical cases, and front-line management experience into classroom teaching, and realize the docking of teaching content and post competency standards. By strengthening whole-process practical training in cognitive practice, professional simulation, post internship, and project research, students’ professional practical operation ability and industrial post adaptation are improved, and the gap between talent training and actual social demand is narrowed.

The digital revolution is an important background for the generation and development of New Liberal Arts. The popularization of big data, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and virtual simulation technology has completely changed the mode of economic management work, and has also reconstructed the ecological environment of higher education teaching. New Liberal Arts clearly requires colleges and universities to actively apply digital information technology, promote the innovation of teaching methods and teaching forms, and build intelligent and digital teaching scenarios.

For economics and management majors, teaching and research reform needs to actively eliminate the outdated single classroom teaching mode, rely on digital teaching platforms and virtual simulation experimental resources, promote the integrated application of online and offline mixed teaching, flipped classrooms, scenario simulation, and project-based teaching, and use data methods to achieve personalized teaching and precise teaching management. Digital technology is used to empower teaching reform, enrich teaching interaction forms, expand learning channels, stimulate students’ autonomous learning willingness and innovative exploration awareness, and realize the upgrading and transformation of teaching modes.

The educational concept is the guide for teaching practice, and the backward teaching concept is the root of the lag in professional teaching reform. At present, quite a number of colleges and universities still adhere to the traditional rationalist teaching concept in the training of economics and management majors, taking teachers, textbooks, and classrooms as the core of teaching activities, and forming a fixed teaching mindset of “focusing on theory, neglecting practice; focusing on knowledge, neglecting ability; focusing on results, neglecting process”.

In the daily teaching process, teachers pay too much attention to the systematic explanation of professional theoretical knowledge, take the completion of classroom teaching tasks and student examination results as the main teaching goals, and lack systematic design for students’ independent learning, cooperative inquiry, and practical innovation training. Most teachers have insufficient understanding of the connotation, goals, and reform requirements of New Liberal Arts construction, and fail to integrate interdisciplinary education, curriculum ideological and political, practical education, and digital teaching into daily teaching design in a targeted manner ([5]). The talent training orientation is still limited to traditional professional talent output, ignoring the demand for compound and innovative talents in the new era. The lag in educational concepts directly leads to a lack of innovation motivation in professional teaching reform, and it is difficult to adapt to the development requirements of the New Liberal Arts.

The curriculum system is the core carrier of talent training. The current curriculum setting of economics and management majors generally follows the traditional disciplinary logic, with rigid module divisions and a solidified course structure. First of all, the boundary between general education courses, professional basic courses, core professional courses, and practical courses is clear and isolated, and there is a lack of effective connection and organic integration between courses. The phenomenon of repeated content, outdated knowledge, and redundant course setting is widespread, which increases the learning burden of students and affects the overall efficiency of talent training.

Secondly, the update speed of curriculum content is slow, and the response to industrial frontier trends is insufficient. The teaching content is mostly limited to traditional classic theories and cases, and the latest industrial changes such as digital economy governance, financial technology innovation, intelligent marketing, low-carbon economic management, and ESG sustainable operation are not timely incorporated into the teaching system. The serious lag of teaching content causes students’ professional knowledge structure to become outdated and unable to cope with the new changes in the industry.

In addition, the disciplinary isolation is prominent, the cross-major and cross-disciplinary curriculum construction is insufficient, and there are few optional interdisciplinary comprehensive courses related to big data analysis, business statistics, economic law, and intelligent management. Students can only learn single professional knowledge within their own majors, lacking systematic cross-disciplinary learning opportunities, resulting in a singular knowledge structure and weak comprehensive ability to solve complex economic management problems.

At present, the classroom teaching of economics and management majors is still dominated by the traditional indoctrination teaching mode of “blackboard + PPT”. Teachers take knowledge explanation as the main work, and students passively accept theoretical knowledge. The classroom interaction is insufficient, and diversified teaching methods such as case teaching, project-driven teaching, scenario simulation, and field research are not fully popularized and applied. The single teaching form leads to a dull classroom atmosphere, low students’ learning initiative and participation, and it is difficult to stimulate students’ innovative thinking and practical thinking.

In the context of digital education popularization, although most colleges and universities have introduced online teaching platforms, smart classroom equipment, and digital teaching resources, the application of digital teaching is mostly superficial and formalistic. Online platforms are only used for simple functions such as courseware release, homework submission, and score statistics, and the in-depth integration of online preview, online discussion, data analysis, and offline classroom teaching is not realized. The construction of virtual simulation experimental courses for economics and management lags behind, and digital teaching means cannot effectively make up for the shortcomings of traditional practical teaching. The technical advantages of big data, artificial intelligence, and other information technologies have not been transformed into teaching effectiveness, resulting in a low utilization rate of digital teaching resources and serious waste of educational resources.

Practical teaching is the key link to realize the applied talent training goal of economics and management majors, and it is also the weakest link in current professional teaching. First of all, the overall proportion of practical credits is low, the practical teaching content is single and shallow, and most practical courses are limited to simple verification experiments, textbook simulation operations, and data calculation exercises. There are few comprehensive practical projects, innovative design projects, and enterprise real project training, which cannot exercise students’ comprehensive practical ability.

Secondly, the construction of off-campus internship bases is insufficient, and the school-enterprise cooperation mechanism is not perfect. Most school-enterprise cooperation remains at the level of signing cooperation agreements, enterprise visits, and short-term simple internships. Enterprises lack long-term incentive mechanisms to participate in talent training and cannot provide stable post-internship positions and professional practical guidance for students ([1]). Students’ internships are often reduced to superficial visiting learning, lacking in-depth post exercises, resulting in poor practical training effects.

Thirdly, the practical teaching management system is not perfect, the whole-process supervision of students’ practical learning is lacking, and the practical assessment standard is vague. The evaluation of practical results is mostly based on internship reports and materials submitted by students, with strong subjectivity and weak binding force, which makes students’ practical learning perfunctory and makes it difficult to achieve the practical training goal.

The construction of high-quality teaching staff is the basic guarantee of teaching reform. At present, the teachers of economics and management majors generally have a solid theoretical foundation and strong theoretical teaching ability, but there are obvious structural defects and ability shortcomings. On the one hand, the age structure and educational background structure of teachers are solidified. Most young teachers graduate directly from colleges and universities, with a high academic level but zero enterprise practical experience. They have long been engaged in theoretical teaching and scientific research and lack front-line experience in enterprise operation, market management, financial practice, and project operation. It is difficult to provide targeted and professional practical guidance for students in practical teaching.

On the other hand, colleges and universities lack a long-term training mechanism for teachers’ practical ability improvement. The systems of teachers’ temporary post exercises in enterprises, industrial special training, and industry-university cooperative research are not perfect. Teachers have few opportunities to contact industrial front-line business and frontier technologies, and their ability to carry out interdisciplinary teaching, digital teaching, and case teaching is insufficient. At the same time, the introduction of high-quality industrial tutors is insufficient, the part-time teacher team composed of enterprise executives and industry experts is small in scale and unstable in operation, and the dual-qualified teaching team construction is seriously lagging behind, which cannot meet the practical teaching and interdisciplinary teaching needs under the background of New Liberal Arts.

The talent evaluation mechanism is the baton of talent training. The current teaching quality evaluation and student achievement evaluation of economics and management majors still adopt the traditional single assessment mode. In terms of student assessment, it takes final closed-book examination results as the core assessment standard, with a high proportion of summative assessment. The assessment content focuses on the memory and understanding of theoretical knowledge, while ignoring the process evaluation of students’ classroom performance, cooperative learning, case analysis, practical operation, and innovative practice.

The single evaluation content cannot effectively assess students’ practical ability, innovative thinking, team cooperation ability, and professional ethics literacy. In terms of evaluation subjects, it is dominated by teachers’ one-way evaluation, lacking the multi-dimensional evaluation participation of enterprise tutors, industry experts, students’ self-evaluation, and mutual evaluation, and the evaluation results are one-sided and lack objectivity and comprehensiveness. In addition, the teaching evaluation of teachers is too inclined towards scientific research achievements and classroom workload, and the attention to teaching innovation, curriculum ideological and political reform, and practical teaching effect is insufficient, which restricts the initiative of teachers to participate in teaching and research reform.

First, establish a student-centered modern teaching philosophy. Completely abandon the traditional teacher-led indoctrination education model, take students’ personalized development and comprehensive ability improvement as the core goal of teaching, respect students’ dominant position in learning, and fully consider students’ cognitive rules, learning characteristics, and development needs in all links of teaching design, classroom organization, and teaching evaluation. Guide students to change from passive acceptance to autonomous exploration, cooperative learning, and active practical innovation, and stimulate students’ internal learning motivation and innovative potential.

Second, deepen the whole-process integration of curriculum ideology and politics. Dig deeply into the implicit ideological and political resources of each professional course in economics and management, and organically integrate business integrity, fair competition, green development, social responsibility, rule of law awareness, and patriotic education into professional teaching. Combined with typical negative industry cases and positive typical deeds, strengthen the education of professional ethics and occupational responsibility, realize the organic integration of professional knowledge teaching and value guidance, and cultivate high-quality talents with both ability and political integrity.

Third, establish open and integrated educational concepts. Actively respond to the requirements of New Liberal Arts, break the closed disciplinary thinking, establish an open educational concept of interdisciplinary integration and industry-education integration, take industrial development as the guidance, connect professional education with social development, and realize the precise alignment of talent training goals and social talent needs.

First, build a four-dimensional integrated curriculum system of “general education + major foundation + interdisciplinary frontier + practical innovation”. Optimize the overall curriculum structure, appropriately increase the proportion of high-quality general education courses such as humanities, law, and digital literacy, and consolidate students’ comprehensive humanistic foundation. Streamline repetitive and outdated professional courses, optimize the core professional curriculum system, and consolidate students’ basic professional ability ([6]). Focus on adding interdisciplinary frontier courses such as big data economic analysis, financial technology application, intelligent business management, low-carbon economy, and ESG operation management to address the shortage of frontier teaching content. Reasonably increase the credit proportion of practical courses, and build a progressive practical curriculum system covering the whole university stage.

Second, establish a dynamic content update mechanism. Take industrial development and post demand as the orientation, regularly sort out the latest industry policies, technological progress, and typical enterprise cases, timely eliminate outdated theoretical content and outdated teaching cases, and incorporate industrial hot issues and the latest research results into classroom teaching. Invite enterprise management experts and industry technicians to participate in curriculum revision and textbook compilation, and ensure the timeliness, practicality, and frontier nature of the teaching content.

Third, develop diversified shared curriculum resources. Relying on information technology, develop high-quality open online courses, micro-lessons, interdisciplinary case databases, and practical teaching resource libraries, and build a school-enterprise shared teaching resource platform. Jointly compile practical textbooks and enterprise case textbooks with industries and enterprises to enrich diversified teaching carriers and meet students’ personalized and autonomous learning needs.

First, comprehensively promote online-offline hybrid teaching. Rely on mature digital teaching platforms to build a pre-class preview, in-class interaction, and after-class expansion integrated teaching model. Arrange video learning, case reading, and online discussion tasks before class; focus on key and difficult point explanations, group discussion, case analysis, and project cooperation in class; consolidate learning effects through online homework, personalized Q&A, and online tests after class, so as to break the time and space restrictions of traditional teaching.

Second, popularize diversified interactive teaching methods. According to the curriculum attributes and training goals, flexibly use the case teaching method, project-based learning, flipped classroom, scenario simulation, enterprise field investigation, and thematic debate. Take real enterprise operation cases and economic hot topics as the teaching carrier, guide students to carry out independent analysis and cooperative discussion, enhance classroom interaction and attraction, and cultivate students’ logical thinking and problem-solving ability.

Third, build intelligent digital teaching scenarios. Accelerate the construction of virtual simulation experimental teaching platforms for economics and management, develop virtual simulation projects such as enterprise operation simulation, financial risk early warning, and securities investment simulation, and solve practical teaching difficulties such as high cost and difficult operation. Use big data technology to collect and analyze students’ learning behavior data, accurately identify learning weaknesses, realize personalized teaching guidance, and improve the pertinence and effectiveness of teaching.

First, construct a hierarchical progressive practical teaching system. Form a step-by-step practical training system of “freshman cognitive practice-sophomore basic professional practice-junior comprehensive professional training-senior post internship and innovative practice”. Design practical tasks in layers according to students’ learning stages, gradually improve the difficulty and comprehensiveness of practical projects, and realize the gradual improvement of students’ practical ability.

Second, deepen in-depth school-enterprise collaborative education. Establish long-term, stable, strategic cooperative relations with leading enterprises, industry associations, and local industrial parks; build high-quality off-campus internship and training bases; and realize resource sharing, talent co-education, and achievement co-creation. Implement the school-enterprise dual tutor system by assigning enterprise front-line managers as practical tutors to guide students’ internships, project research, and graduation design. Explore order-based talent training and customized talent training modes to meet the personalized talent needs of enterprises.

Third, expand diversified practical forms. On the basis of traditional internships and experimental training, actively carry out discipline competitions, social surveys, industry research, innovation and entrepreneurship projects, and volunteer service activities. Take professional competitions as the starting point to promote learning through competitions and improve students’ practical application ability; guide students to focus on local economic development and actual enterprise problems to carry out social research, so as to realize the integration of professional learning and social practice.

First, improve the practical ability training mechanism of in-service teachers. Formulate a regular enterprise exercise system, select professional teachers to take temporary posts in enterprises for long-term exercise every year, and accumulate front-line industrial practical experience. Organize special training on new liberal arts construction, digital teaching, big data technology, and curriculum ideological and political education for teachers to continuously update teachers’ educational concepts and professional knowledge system. Encourage teachers to participate in horizontal scientific research projects entrusted by enterprises, and promote the mutual integration of scientific research and teaching.

Second, optimize the teachers’ introduction and employment mechanism. Appropriately introduce high-level industrial talents, such as enterprise senior managers, financial directors, and marketing experts, as part-time teachers to undertake the teaching of practical courses and industry frontier courses, and make up for the lack of practical teachers. Establish a dynamic industry expert database to provide long-term teaching support for professional practical teaching and interdisciplinary teaching.

Third, strengthen the construction of teaching and research teams. Take majors and interdisciplinary fields as the units to set up teaching and research innovation teams, carry out regular collective lesson preparation, teaching observation, and teaching reform research, share teaching experience, tackle key teaching problems, and form a good teaching research atmosphere. Encourage teachers to apply for teaching reform projects and high-quality curriculum construction, and fully stimulate teachers’ enthusiasm for teaching innovation.

First, optimize the evaluation content and build a three-dimensional evaluation system of “knowledge + ability + literacy”. On the basis of assessing students’ professional theoretical knowledge, increase the assessment weight of practical operation, data analysis, team cooperation, innovative design, and professional ethics, and achieve a comprehensive assessment of students’ comprehensive quality.

Second, adjust the evaluation proportion and combine formative assessment with summative assessment. Reduce the proportion of final examination scores to less than 50%, and incorporate classroom performance, group tasks, case reports, practical results, and competition achievements into formative assessment, so as to realize whole-process tracking and evaluation of students’ learning. For practical courses and interdisciplinary courses, adopt process-oriented assessment and project achievement evaluation to ensure the rationality of evaluation results.

Third, expand evaluation subjects and realize multi-party joint evaluation. Break the single teacher evaluation mode, and build a multi-dimensional evaluation system including teacher evaluation, student self-evaluation, peer mutual evaluation, enterprise tutor evaluation, and industry expert evaluation. Multiple subjects jointly evaluate students’ learning performance and practical performance, which makes the evaluation results more objective, fair, and comprehensive, and guides students to pay attention to all-round ability improvement.

Colleges and universities should design the overall plan for the teaching reform of economics and management majors under the New Liberal Arts at a top level, clarify the reform objectives, implementation steps, and responsibility division, and formulate supporting management systems such as curriculum management, practical teaching management, and school-enterprise cooperation management. Improve the teacher assessment and incentive system, take teachers’ participation in teaching reform, practical guidance, and curriculum innovation as important indicators of professional title evaluation and performance assessment, and fully mobilize teachers’ reform initiative.

Increase special financial investment for New Liberal Arts teaching reform, and focus on supporting interdisciplinary curriculum construction, digital teaching platform upgrading, virtual simulation laboratory construction, teacher practical training, and school-enterprise base construction. Optimize the allocation of teaching hardware and information resources, integrate high-quality industry resources and educational resources, and provide sufficient material and resource guarantees for the smooth progress of teaching and research reform.

Establish an all-round and whole-process teaching quality monitoring system. To quantitatively measure the effectiveness of reforms, this paper constructs a system of quantifiable evaluation indicators for long-term tracking of teaching reform implementation. The indicators are specified as follows: First, Teaching indicators: Number of interdisciplinary courses offered and coverage rate of digital courses. Second, Faculty indicators: Proportion of dual-qualified teachers and cumulative duration of teachers’ on-the-job practice in enterprises ([2]). Third, Student indicators: Number of student competition awards, compliance rate of internships and practical training, and completion quality of course projects. Fourth, Talent cultivation indicators: Employer satisfaction rate, post adaptation rate of graduates, and student participation rate in innovation and entrepreneurship activities.

Colleges and universities shall conduct annual quality assessments based on the above quantitative indicators. Combined with teaching supervision, peer class observation, student teaching evaluation, enterprise feedback, and data analysis of teaching performance, institutions can monitor the progress of teaching and research reforms in real time, identify and address existing problems in a timely manner, dynamically revise teaching schemes, and optimize teaching content. This will form a closed-loop management mechanism of “teaching-monitoring-feedback-improvement”, so as to ensure the practical outcomes of teaching and research reforms.