In the teaching process of higher education, the attention is often paid on the improvement of the teaching ability of teachers, but the necessary thinking on the improvement of the ability to gain knowledge of students is lacked. Combined with the development of the online teaching mode in recent China, the author conducted a survey and analyzed the state of the audience students, and on this basis, carried out thinking on the innovation of teaching methods of higher education. Through the survey about learning state, it is reflected that under the online mode, the students ''self-consciousness has a significant impact on the learning effect, and the improvement of students'' self-consciousness is also achieved gradually during the learning process. In the analysis of the teaching methods and models, combined with the differences in the characteristics of the audience students in the survey at each stage, the idea that teaching method should be taken according to different stages was put forward.