Multiple-choice questions (MCQs) play a crucial role in fostering deep thinking and knowledge integration in education. However, previous research has primarily focused on generating MCQs with textual options, but it largely overlooks the visual options. Moreover, generating high-quality distractors remains a major challenge due to the high cost and limited scalability of manual authoring. To tackle these problems, we propose a Cross-modal Options Synthesis (CmOS), a novel framework for generating educational MCQs with visual options. Our framework integrates Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) reasoning process and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to produce semantically plausible and visually similar answer and distractor. It also includes a discrimination module to identify content suitable for visual options. Experimental results on test tasks demonstrate the superiority of CmOS in content discrimination, question generation and visual option generation over existing methods across various subjects and educational levels.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have developed rapidly and attracted large number of learners. In this work, we present MAssistant system, a personal knowledge assistant for MOOC learners. MAssistant helps users to trace the concepts they have learned in MOOCs, and to build their own concept graphs. There are three key components in MAssistant: (i) a large-scale concept graph built from open data sources, which contains concepts in various domains and relations among them; (ii) a browser extension which interacts with learners when they are watching video lectures, and presents important concepts to them; (iii) a web application allowing users to explore their personal concept graphs, which are built based on their learning activities on MOOCs. MAssistant will facilitate the knowledge management task for MOOC learners, and make the learning on MOOCs easier.