When Saying No Makes Better Videos: Designing Dual Gatekeeping for Pedagogically Grounded AI Content Creation

While advancements in Text-to-Video (T2V) generative AI offer a promising path toward democratizing content creation, current models are often optimized for visual fidelity rather than instructional efficacy. This study introduces PedaCo-Gen, a pedagogically-informed human-AI collaborative video generating system for authoring instructional videos based on Mayer's Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (CTML). Moving away from traditional "one-shot" generation, PedaCo-Gen introduces an Intermediate Representation (IR) phase, enabling educators to interactively review and refine video blueprints-comprising scripts and visual descriptions-with an AI reviewer. Our study with 23 education experts demonstrates that PedaCo-Gen significantly enhances video quality across various topics and CTML principles compared to baselines. Participants perceived the AI-driven guidance not merely as a set of instructions but as a metacognitive scaffold that augmented their instructional design expertise, reporting high production efficiency (M=4.26) and guide validity (M=4.04). These findings highlight the importance of reclaiming pedagogical agency through principled co-creation, providing a foundation for future AI authoring tools that harmonize generative power with human professional expertise.

Generative AI enables scalable production of educational videos, but current systems largely focus on producing visually coherent content rather than supporting learning. As a result, generated videos often lack explicit pedagogical structure, reliable quality control, and mechanisms for assessing learner understanding or addressing misconceptions. In this work, we introduce PIVOT (Pedagogy-guided Instructional VideO Tutoring), a generative video tutoring framework for STEM learning via learning-centered instructional support.1 Inspired by conventional teaching workflows, our framework integrates pedagogy into the full generation pipeline: it first uses instructional principles to guide storyboard generation, then produces verified multimodal videos through code-centric generation and a pedagogical verification harness, and finally connects videos with assessment and misconception-aware remediation. Experiments and expert evaluations across four STEM domains show that our framework produces educational videos with pedagogically aligned content, clear and engaging presentation, coherent instructional flow, and perceived effectiveness for learning. These findings suggest a human-centered perspective on educational content generation: generative systems should be evaluated and designed not only by what they produce, but also by how they support teaching practices, learner understanding, and corrective feedback.

Existing AI-generated video quality assessment (AIGVQA) methods mainly focus on global perceptual realism and coarse text-video alignment, while overlooking a critical requirement in educational scenarios: concept correctness. In early mathematics education, subtle errors in numerical quantities, geometric relations, or spatial configurations may fundamentally alter the conveyed knowledge despite visually plausible generation. To address this problem, we introduce EduAVQABench, the first benchmark for concept-aware educational AIGV assessment, containing 1,130 videos generated by ten state-of-the-art T2V models together with over 310,650 fine-grained human annotations spanning perceptual quality and semantic alignment. Built upon this benchmark, we further propose EduVQA, a concept-aware AIGVQA framework equipped with a Structured 2D Mixture-of-Experts (S2D-MoE) architecture. By jointly modeling fine-grained concept assessment and overall quality prediction through shared experts and adaptive two-dimensional routing, EduVQA effectively captures subtle concept-level inconsistencies overlooked by conventional global scoring methods. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EduVQA consistently outperforms existing AIGVQA approaches across both perceptual and semantic evaluation tasks while exhibiting strong generalization capability on unseen benchmarks. Code and dataset will be publicly available at: https://github.com/EduVQA/EduVQA.