English: Analyzing Literary Works, Character Analysis, Essay Structuring, and the Importance of Literature [Content Idea]

Hi Cyrus,

As a writer and a huge appreciator of literature myself, I can't agree more with you on the importance of this suggestion. English, especially Composition and Literature areas, are the "weakest point" of Khan Academy so far, and it would be great for that to be implemented. Of course, what you suggest is a huge topic, so even if they started right away, the content creators would probably take a long time to do something like this. If it happens, this likely won't be implemented for a long time. 

However, there are other sources that are useful for all of these areas. I would suggest researching it some and seeing if you can use any other sites for what you need. I apologize that I don't know much about that myself, but if I can help you with finding something, let me know.

That's a very good suggestion, and I hope Khan Academy makes this a reality. I'll pass this suggestion along as well as your math appreciation idea.

Keep up the good work teaching others and learning more yourself!

-Legolas

I absolutely agree! We have adopted the SAT as our state test in West Virginia and now are required to use Khan Academy to prepare students. While there are entire categories for math, science, arts and humanities, English language arts are reduced to a small grammar course. It is unfortunate that Khan Academy is touted as such an excellent resource when it offers virtually nothing to English teachers. If College Board is going to market its SAT test as a viable state test, then the resources they offer through Khan should be reflective of that. The SAT essay requires students to reflect on an author's arguments and style, yet Khan Academy offers nothing to help students learn about those concepts. The SAT reading and writing tests require students to be able summarize and synthesize texts and to cite/identify/analyze evidence, main ideas, themes, relationships, word meaning, rhetorical devices, text structures, point of view, author's purpose and arguments, development and organization of ideas, and more. Unfortunately, Khan Academy does not offer courses that address those skills. To say the least, I am disappointed in Khan Academy's offerings. Take a look at Common Core or any state's standards, and you will find a plethora of topics to choose from to create multiple English language arts courses.

I agree with this request, it’s be great to see resources focused around literature.

Thank you all for your support! Some revisions have been made. I'm thinking of creating a raw course structure and enlisting the help of my teachers for the next few months.

I'm 66 years old and retired, but I could still use some of these skills. I have upvoted the original post.

One thing I'd like to see Khan Academy undertake, although it would be huge, is to select classic works of world literature, not just in English but in other native or learned languages of the site's users, and create courses around them. The students would be expected to obtain their own copies of the books (but with some of them long out of copyright, they would likely be available online for free). The videos would lecture on highlights of the book, just as a classroom teacher would do for an assigned book. The exercises, unit quizzes, unit tests, and course challenges would ask students questions about the book, some with straightforward answers and others that would make students think about what the author was trying to say. The one limitation of Khan Academy is that the answers would have to be of a type that a "machine" could grade, probably multiple choice. In an actual classroom, essays or short answers would be the norm for these exams. Also, the question and answer platform for vidoes would be used to replace classroom discussions, but this still doesn't exist for the apps. Articles modules could serve as a sort of Cliff Notes for these books, maybe with some "pop quiz" questions embedded in them.

Indeed, the questions would have to be multiple choice as I do not believe the system is advanced enough to grade qualitative data like a human. However, I think a multiple choice question bank can serve useful in applying the knowledge of the works, which will help learners retain the information and remember at the very least important cues.

As far as long answers themselves, it may be useful to have questions that help learners understand how to structure detailed and strong analyses in response to a prompt. For example, if the question reads "A student was tasked with writing a response to the following prompt: []. Analyze the response and select the strong points (question 1), select a replacement sentence for the underlined sentence (question 2), etc," a few answers would be proposed for revisions among other things.

In order to boost the value of the tests, maybe they can be created similar to the SAT English section questions that require you to revise passages and thus employing all of your English skills to improve the passage (in this case a prompt response/literary analysis piece). These kinds of questions also help with constructing sound arguments and thorough analyses, which is very important in the context of a novel. To set the Khan test questions apart from the SAT questions, I would think they'd be more advanced questions.

Thank you very much for commenting, Regina; you've sparked some more very interesting ideas!

I could not agree more with this post, Cyrus.

These are all excellent ideas! It is very true that many of the skills you have listed are not taught or are "glossed over," and yet students are still expected to demonstrate them on standardized testing. 

I have another idea to consider: content on poetry/poetic devices and analysis. Poetry is often used as material in upper level English courses and can be the most confusing part of the English curriculum for students to master. Students are often overwhelmed by the complexity of the poems they find in the classroom. They sometimes find identifying devices in poetry more challenging than identifying devices in prose due to the vastly different structures of poetry and the archaic language found in older poetry. 

If Khan Academy featured breakdowns of example poems from several of the poetic movements, along with explanations of their style and form, etc., it would make this aspect of English class much less intimidating for students. Multiple choice questions focused on identifying devices and other aspects of poems would also be immensely helpful for review.