The Great Courses

Find it odd that I haven’t used this app in months yet this app consumes more cellular data (2.93gb in the past month) than apps that I regularly use and that is including some audio/video apps. Concerning.

I’d give this app a higher rating but it is missing the ability to use Apple Car Play. I listen to the lectures mostly when I’m in the car and it would be so much more helpful to be able to play it on Car Play.

Today, I tried launching the app in iPadOS and I am not getting any of the courses I purchased to show up for viewing. The course titles show, but when I open one of them, the videos are not listed. The error that comes up is “No lectures retrieved, Please try again.” I then tried opening the webpage in Safari, it gave me an error “Access Denied. You don’t have permission to access…”. What changed? Please update the app so I can access my purchased lectures.

The app and the instructional videos are great, but after upgrading to iPadOS 18, the app lost the ability to use AirPlay to cast to my Apple TV device.

Great Courses has terrific content but the app crashes frequently. Frustrating.

It took a while for Great Courses to support off-line video viewing (on long flights, for example). Problem is it still doesn’t work well, crashing frequently and requiring restarting a course multiple times in short time periods.

SEVOND UPDATE: After spending time with customer service, I learn that the problem is even worse than I thought. The app is not sequencing through the lectures in order because I previously listened to them on the app many months ago. Now the app automatically skips every lecture that it thinks I finished — no matter how long ago — and jumps to the next place it finds that it thinks is incomplete. So I end up jumping from the end of lecture 5 to somewhere in lecture 14. It does not seem to occurto these morons that a customer might want to listen to a lecture series a second time. There is no way to reset the “finished” flag on the lectures in order for auto play to work properly. Deleting and re-downloading the lectures also makes no difference. I just cannot believe how stupid this is. END SECOND UPDATE. // UPDATE: I have lowered the rating to one star. The technical shortcomings are appalling. Most annoying is that it will not sequence through downloaded lectures in order - it jumps randomly. The Great Courses is not so great when it comes to technology. END UPDATE. // One obvious place to listen to these lectures is in the car. Unfortunately, this app does not function properly via Apple Car Play. The “play” button shown on the car’s screen does not do anything. Sometimes there is no audio. Other times, after trying to start playback, two or more out-of-sync instances of the lecture start playing at once. This is really frustrating, and makes this app pretty useless.

We really enjoy The Great Courses (iOS) and have purchased many of them as supplemental teaching aides. However, I wish that The Teaching Company would add this app to tvOS for the Apple TV (as it did for Roku and others); at this point, our 4K Apple TVs, which we use regularly, only offer The Great Courses Plus, which only delivers streaming access for that particular premium service (not access to purchased courses).

While we love Great Courses, the app has the following problems. (1) Generally there is no feedback that you have watched one of the lessons. We Chromecast to our TV most of the time. I suspect that the turnover of control to the TV takes the app out of the game. An interrupting phone call, also often leads to trying to find out we we left off. Maybe I need my own button on each session. Seems gross, but if the app can’t track usage, then I need a way. (2) Worse for us who like to ChromeCast the lectures onto our Tv, ChromeCast is failing from the app in many cases. The intro to a class may fail but the rest of the series is okay, others just fail. You can chromecast the same lectures from a PC from the online site if you have a google browser. This is madening! Downgrading the review. And their technical support asks you to wait longer. Years?

I gladly would give the Courses available here 5 stars! They will fascinate you and make you a more interesting, intelligent person. But the app is not worthy of their greatness. The promise of this app is that you can absorb a lot of courses, watching in multiple settings. It’s best feature is that you can switch between video and audio versions of the courses. However it frequently causes me to lose my place. It does not reliably sync with the Apple TV app so I have stopped using that. Also switching between video and audio occasionally restarts the lesson. Also some useful features for a listening app are absent such as a sleep timer or variable speed playback for audio. These are not necessary but the reliable syncing and keeping track of your progress is a must for the experience that this content deserves. Also the search feature oddly doesn’t always return courses that have the search term in the name of the course.