Second class I've bought hoping they had improved. I was wrong. You would think they could keep up with up to date teaching methods, but instead you get the professor in front of the class lecturing. Very few visuals are used. Need to drink lots of coffee to watch.
All professors are knowledgeable and informative. I have dozens of courses on a wide spectrum of topics. Only a few professors are slightly biased giving their own twist on the subject matter. That's OK as I usually catch them as I go through the lectures. The quality of the DVDs are excellent so far. Very few verifiable errors that I catch now and then. I recommend the Great Courses for continued learning as I've learned a lot from them. I find the courses in science and math very enlightening.
I really like the courses, some of which I think are way over priced. The problem I have with this company is the constant mailings. I get a catalog at least once, sometimes twice a week. The more purchases I make, the more catalogs they send me. I called customer service where I spoke to a robot that lets you opt-out of the constant mailing, but that did not stop the mailings. It slowed down for about 3 weeks then it started again. I would love to stick with this company, but if they don't start acting in a civil manner I will have nothing to do with them.
Some of the courses are ok, but when you cancel, they steal money without authorisation from your credit card. I even changed the number of my credit card to one with no funds, & they still stole from my account. Steer clear of them, they are thieves. I have reported to the fraud dept of my bank.
I use lots of different online education options. The Great Courses is my favorite. Their quality is unmatched. The professors I've watched have all been great. When I look through their catalog there are always a dozen courses that I wish I could take. I just wish I had the time.
I normally purchase digital courses on their website. The one time I called, I had a good experience.
I recently watched the new course on Hannibal. It was presented well and was very informative. What a great way to feed your brain.
I have been buying courses from them for the past 15 years. Primarily, history, literature, and philosophy, political science. Most of the courses were pretty good. But, I have noticed that professors were starting to inject political views in their courses a while back. Nowadays, practically every course is heavily biased towards the political correctness/woke side of the spectrum. One of the courses is blatant/in your face propaganda from 3 professors who work for an NGO backed by Soros and Gates... The name of the course is "Fighting Disinformation". Oh, the irony! What were they thinking? So for me, the Great Courses are over. Will never buy from them again.
Website operation was funky and ordered something I didn't want. Contacted customer service right away and said nothing they could do but for me to return it when I received it. Also a few days later they removed a promotional code I entered that was accepted and proceeded to charge my credit card the incremental difference without my authorization. No response from customer service when I complained about this.
We had ordered 5 of these courses without problems-they were not as informative as promised, but good for an overview of the subject.
Then we ordered the Great Civilizations course and it had several discs that were scratched or otherwise unable to play.
I was told that there were no replacements and they could only send me a single DVD.
This is totally ridiculous. I asked them to replace the whole course with the DVD set and they refused-so much for their great customer service
What good is one DVD going to do? Is it my fault their product is faulty?
I asked for a supervisor to call me back 2 weeks ago and I am still waiting.
Don't waste your money, just get a PBS course through Netflix
I'm a pretty big fan of The Great Courses DVDs. They have courses on just about everything from science to philosophy to composers and artists. I think the biggest problem is that they're too expensive. I think they're going to have some problems as more and more of the material in The Great Courses will be available online for free. But until then, they have my business!
Overview
The Great Courses has a rating of 2 stars from 40 reviews, indicating that most customers are generally dissatisfied with their purchases. Reviewers dissatisfied with The Great Courses most frequently mention customer service and credit card. The Great Courses ranks 3959th among Education sites.
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- Sitejabber’s sole mission is to increase online transparency for buyers and businesses
- Sitejabber has helped over 200M buyers make better purchasing decisions online
- Suspicious reviews are flagged by our algorithms, moderators, and community members