In the context of the new era, the rapid development of Internet technology, artificial intelligence and other technologies, the field of education will enter the “era of intelligent education”. The research centers on the self-study examination of higher education, and builds an artificial intelligence-driven intelligent teaching platform, which integrates the functions of intelligent management, intelligent examination, intelligent education, intelligent learning, intelligent evaluation, intelligent service and so on. A feature extraction module is proposed based on convolutional neural network and knowledge graph, which utilizes the powerful feature extraction capability of CNN to extract the implicit features of courses and users, constructs a course resource recommendation model, and analyzes the application of artificial intelligence in the smart teaching platform. The accuracy (0.857 and 0.791) and area under the ROC curve (0.876 and 0.804) results of the model on different datasets are better than those of the comparison model, reflecting better resource recommendation performance. After using the smart education platform, more than 57% of learners have positive attitudes towards the platform, their learning experience, and their learning outcomes. The smart education platform constructed in the article can enhance learners’ interest, motivation, performance, and efficiency in learning, and help them achieve intelligence and efficiency in self-study exam preparation.