The Great Courses

I finally took the advice I received in 2 emails and placed a call. The lovely lady helped me by resetting my password, which allowed access to the missing course. She said to use the catalog code for the discount, something you can do easily if Chrome is your browser, but the app doesn’t seem to have that capability. It took at least half an hour to sort things out, but the call was worth that.

I’m baffled by the positive ratings. I wasn’t expecting the app to be as slick as Netflix, but it’s the worst online video learning app I have tried. It’s about as bad as WestLegalEdcenter’s audio-only continuing legal education app, which is to be expected since the audience for that content is so small and shouldn’t be playing Tetris while taking a course for CLE credit. While it seems this app was updated 2 weeks ago for a “new crash diagnostic code,” it’s clear that the app’s features haven’t been updated in many years or the people developing it haven’t kept up with the state of the art in online learning or even basic features of Netflix 5 years ago. As an example, what is the point of a picture-in-picture feature if the video & audio stop if you try to open another app? That might make sense for continuing education courses for credit, but I’m talking about a course on dog training! (May explain why some people have commented that they prefer accessing content through iTunes) Also, why are downloads so slow and why isn’t there an option to download an entire course (all videos at once, instead of individually)? As just one comparison, the Udemy app isn’t great, but PiP works and you have the option to download individual segments or the entire course. These are just two examples. I’ve noticed that many other reviewers have bulleted their issues with the app and what’s apparent is that no one is paying attention to the feedback. The only reason I’m writing this review is to add my voice to the chorus to help lower the unreasonably high rating so that Great Courses starts to pay attention, if not to us, to their competition!

I can’t get the courses I’ve bought to download or even to play via WiFi. I’ve tried to deal with the company and they were useless. They have always had great courses but without being able to listen to them means I’ve just wasted my money. They take zero responsibility for the uselessness of what they offer.

The app isn’t available for fire tv but it is for Roku. On fire tv they expect users to pay a monthly subscription fee for a catalog of courses they choose. I want to be able to sign into my account and stream my library using my fireTV and as of now I can’t. Ridiculous.

Courses can not be downloaded to an iPad or iPhone. So as far as I’m concerned the app is useless.

You’d think it would be easy to create an app that can play a downloaded mp3 file from beginning to end without crashing. But it’s obviously beyond The Great Courses. On their app, you’re doing well if you can go three minutes without a crash. If you’re not doing so well, you’ll find yourself listening to parts of lectures three or four times before the app can manage to get past them… and also find yourself wasting endless time trying to find where the app last dumped you, since where the progress bar is when you return bears no relation to where in the lecture the latest crash occurred. Mind you, their website is no less useless. I’ve been trying for a month to get it to change my email address on it, and it keeps on erasing it and insisting that nothing happened. I’ve been using The Great Courses for over twenty years, but I’ve about had it.

Signed up for Great Courses and downloaded a bunch of lectures to occupy me on a 6 hour flight. I get on the flight l, clear 10,000 feet and turn to my phone to use my “offline content” and am asked to login. Of course I’m offline so when I try to login I’m told I need to be online. I’ve pulled my company benefit support for Great Courses because it is unavailable at the time when it’s the most useful. Teacher heal thyself… UPDATE after hearing back from their developers via the App Store they provided a generic answer that didn’t actually solve the problem. Now their developers did reach out to me directly and provide a better answer. That may work, and I will check on my next flight but the answer that was posted here by them was totally useless it directed me to a generic FAQ. Reammt what they should do is update the FAQ to answer my specific question as theg answered it in the back channel. That would be more useful

I hate it when you fix something when it ain’t broke. This new update takes away the option from choosing to listen to the audio or video of the lectures. Now I’m stuck with the video playing while trying to listen to the lecture during my driving commute to work. Lame

This class is difficult to understand. The Spanish lady sounds like she is sneezing or grunting when she speaks a word. She speaks way too fast. BIG WASTE OF MONEY

The app doesn’t recognize my email and password, even though I’m entering them correctly. That being said, I’ve attempted to “reset” the password anyway, and all it will tell me is “try again later”. So, essentially, I have no access to all of the courses I’ve purchased! This is so infuriating!