Abstract: In an era of knowledge explosion and global digitization, educational literature is presented in a massive way. At the same time, its content and themes are changing rapidly. Using the traditional methods of educational literature processing, it’s hard to study such massive and varied educational literature objectively and capture the characteristics of its development. Therefore, it’s essential for today’s educational researchers to know how to handle such massive information objectively, effectively and scientifically generated by the digital age and generate new knowledge that can be shared by others. This study aims to help educational researchers to translate abstract information into visual information through computers and improve their ability of identifying abstract information. It not only offers a detailed introduction of the principles of knowledge mapping, the drawing processes and related considerations, but also gives an example to demonstrate the process of educational literature content visualization. First, master's and doctor's thesis from CNKI database are selected; second, distance education is specified as a search topic. Then, using Bicomb 2.0 and SPSS20 as the tools of knowledge mapping, it extracts high frequency keywords and sets up the co-word matrix of high frequency key words, conducts cluster analysis and multi-dimension analysis of high frequency key words and draws out the knowledge mapping of high frequency key words. Finally, it presents the results graph of literature content visualization and an explanation of the research field distribution. The findings show that, as an educational literature content visualization, knowledge mapping is a relatively new method of scientific analysis. Knowledge mapping helps to reveal the converging point of educational research frontier through visual images as well as the whole picture of educational researches at the macro, meso and micro level. It can help educational researchers to overview the structure and research focus of educational researches in general. Also, through information visualization, knowledge mapping combines quantitative research with qualitative research to study educational literature, thus greatly enhancing the quality of educational literature research and providing effective technical support for an in-depth interpretation of massive educational literature.