Enhancing the Learning Experience: Using Vision-Language Models to Generate Questions for Educational Videos

Web-based educational videos offer flexible learning opportunities and are becoming increasingly popular. However, improving user engagement and knowledge retention remains a challenge. Automatically generated questions can activate learners and support their knowledge acquisition. Further, they can help teachers and learners assess their understanding. While large language and vision-language models have been employed in various tasks, their application to question generation for educational videos remains underexplored. In this paper, we investigate the capabilities of current vision-language models for generating learning-oriented questions for educational video content. We assess (1) out-of-the-box models' performance; (2) fine-tuning effects on content-specific question generation; (3) the impact of different video modalities on question quality; and (4) in a qualitative study, question relevance, answerability, and difficulty levels of generated questions. Our findings delineate the capabilities of current vision-language models, highlighting the need for fine-tuning and addressing challenges in question diversity and relevance. We identify requirements for future multimodal datasets and outline promising research directions.

@article{stamatakis2025_2505.01790,
  title={ Enhancing the Learning Experience: Using Vision-Language Models to Generate Questions for Educational Videos },
  author={ Markos Stamatakis and Joshua Berger and Christian Wartena and Ralph Ewerth and Anett Hoppe },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.01790},
  year={ 2025 }
}