The development of time and technology has made the traditional basic computer teaching unable to meet the needs of current students, and the cultivation of computer thinking ability has become a hotspot of computer education concern. The article combines the flipped classroom model with the MOOC platform of network education, and establishes a MOOC flipped classroom teaching model applicable to computer basic education courses in art colleges. In this model, students’ assessment results data are collected, and the Apriori algorithm optimised by matrix optimisation and prior pruning strategy is used to mine the association relationship of the assessment results, which helps teachers to understand students’ computer knowledge mastery. T College of Fine Arts is used as a research example to illustrate the effectiveness of MOOC flipped classroom through the changes in students’ performance, competence, and satisfaction. The improved Apriori algorithm has an execution time of only 2.93s when its minimum support is 100%, which can be used to understand students’ computer application ability for different question types, majors and skill performances. The mean score of the final exam of the students in the experimental class was 82.79, which reached 111.79% of the score of the control class, and more than 80% of them were satisfied with the MOOC flipped classroom. The use of flipped classroom and network education model can achieve the innovative development of computer basic education courses in art colleges and help to enhance the teaching quality of computer basic education courses in art colleges.