The Great Courses can help you get smart
Stream away: Video lessons are an open book for learning
Tired of binge-watching? Try some binge learning.
Extended-learning company The Great Courses now lets you construct your own independent study syllabus and stream it at home and on the go.
The Chantilly, Va.-based company, which celebrates its 25th anniversary in September, has begun offering many of its 5,000 video lessons as part of a subscription streaming video-on-demand service.
Currently in beta testing but set to go live this fall, The Great Courses Plus gives subscribers access to individual lectures within the educational firm’s 7,000 hours-plus of content. That means you can mix and match from the tens of thousands of lectures within a wide variety of courses about science, travel, history, photography, fine arts, music, religion and economics. The Culinary Institute of America, National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution serve as partners on many of the courses.
“It’s a different model, and some of our current customers may be interested in it, but we see this as introducing an entirely different generation of customers to The Great Courses,” said Scott Ableman, the company’s chief marketing officer.
Traditionally, when a customer purchases a lesson plan from The Great Courses today, they get all of the lectures within a course. Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies has 36 individual lectures of about 30 minutes each — Julius Caesar: The Matter of Rome and Macbeth: Musing on Murder, for instance — and the course is sold as an audio download ($75.90), CD ($106.90), DVD ($151.90) and video download ($129.90). Once purchased, the course can be streamed, too.
Overall, the costs of The Great Courses range from as low as $16 to more than $500. But subscribers to The Great Courses Plus ($49.95 monthly or $360 annually) get unlimited access to courses and can view individual lectures within each course at will.
“Now, you can dive into a halfhour lesson on the (Shakespearean era) Old Globe (Theatre), but then you may want to go to one of the other courses on the city of London or maybe learn how to cook something because you have a dinner party coming up and want to rediscover the lost art of cooking from the Culinary Institute of America,” chief brand officer Ed Leon said. “We see this as the ultimate expression of the brand. You get thousands of lessons for one price.”
Initially, The Great Courses Plus is available online and for Android devices in the Google Play store.