Journal of Intelligent Computing Dongming Zhao,Xiaojie Ge 16 1 2025 https://doi.org/10.6025/jic/2025/16/1/19-27 https://www.dline.info/jic/fulltext/v16n1/jicv16n1_3.pdf In today’s higher education institutions, the development of “big ideology” has become essential. From a macro perspective, integrating “big ideology” into the classroom allows for better utilization of course resources and improves the classroom atmosphere. It also makes the curriculum more relevant to students’ daily needs, thereby better cultivating their moral qualities. Therefore, this study explicitly analyses the university education model of nurturing students from the ideological and political education perspective, considering the association rules algorithm and its value. The study optimizes the association rules algorithm, drawing inspiration from the harmony search algorithm’s main ideas, and introduces the concept of “self-learning” for students’ improvement, thereby enhancing the overall search capability of the group and delving into the deficiencies in the analysis of students’ existing course grades. The study proposes an association rules algorithm with self-learning capabilities, and the optimized performance of the association rules algorithm surpasses that of the function algorithm. The comparative results indicate that the optimization can achieve the ideal optimal solution of the reference function, and the proposed optimization significantly improves the computational performance of the rules algorithm. The algorithm’s advantage increases considerably from 1000 rounds, and the network’s lifetime extends to 1600 rounds. Through testing, it is found that applying association rules mining technology to analyze students’ academic performance helps identify the relationship between course settings and course grades on the platform network, contributing to discovering essential information hidden in the network. Universities should actively explore the model of ideological and political education in practice and cultivate students, construct a “dual-platform and four-linkage” practical education model considering the association rules algorithm under the perspective of “big ideology,” fully exert the value of ideological and political education in practice, and promote effective reform and progress of ideological and political education in universities.