The Great Courses Hack 8.2.3 + Redeem Codes

I see everyone on here is complaining about how hard it is to use while driving, which makes me very concerned about what else they’re doing while driving. Yes, you need to download first if you live in a rural area. Yes, you can’t skip, stop, rewind, or fast forward easily while driving. You’re not supposed to! Put the phone down, people! The only true issue I have is the buttons are tiny, and even when I was home, sitting still, I had to try several times to make it understand I wanted to download. And I have fairly small fingers. That being said, it’s a really cool way to get these lectures. We spend most of our lives on the go, and I’m just not going to taking the time to stop and watch something or use my computer to listen. But I can easily finish a lecture in a day’s worth of car time with this app. Which is not so great for my wallet, granted, but a great way to consume information.

Despite providing good content, this organization has a unintuitive app and zero customer support. I got the download for two classes in December but could not them to import them into the app. Despite extensively working through the app on my phone I decided to call customer support. The first time I waited on hold for 45 minutes and there was no answer. The second time I waited for 35 minutes and there was no answer. When I emailed customer support, I got a response after 10 days. When I explain the situation in more detail over email, the customer service rep just disappeared and never responded back. We are basically forced to go to the credit card company and get a refund for the purchase. Strangely enough however, when you call In to give them more money to make a purchase (which I tried only to get a human on the phone) one gets a person on the phone right away. But when they transfer you over to Technical Support, there is no one there - imagine that! So buyer beware! Unless you mail order something from them, get ready for a scam, a refund scenario or no response. What this company has in great content is deeply overshadowed by zero customer support and a lack of concern for its customers.

TGC stand on there own, and their customer service is the bench mark for how a company should be run. This is why I couldn’t see myself giving less than 4 stars and struggled not to give them five. I have been a customer since the cassette days when you use to mail them a check and wait for the course to arrive.
I transitioned to the digital format a few years ago and TTC took very good care of this long time customer by transferring all of my courses over to my digital library. Amazing and I was so appreciative for this service which TTC clearly did not have to do.
I do not mind downloading lectures to my pad or phone it works as it should. When driving the pause and play “button” works just fine, I don’t see the issue others are having. If TTC would update this app so you could customize the organization of the library it would be a 5 star app in my opinion. S-lama

The app needs work. I own 377 courses from the teaching company. This app doesn't allow me to organize the courses into files. I would like to bundle the courses into categories so I could listen to the lectures in a logical sequence, but the app only lists courses in alphabetical order, most recent purchase, or most recently opened. They should offer other ways of categorizing the courses such as topics. Other problems with the app are the FF and Rewind are too close to other items, I can't tell you how many times I tried to rewind a bit, only bring it to the beginning or move to the next lecture.

The quality of the lectures is excellent! Informative and interesting. Each lecture is just enough time to cover a topic without being too long. I can listen to a lecture going to and coming from work. Converting down time to productive time. Now I don't get frustrated with traffic.

I wish they would just improve the app.

I love the wide selection of course offerings, you can learn quite a bit in half hour blocks and each course runs in average between 24 and 34 lectures. I’ve learned about Japan, grammar, art history, literature, geology to name but a few.
My disappointments are with the downloads. You absolutely must download over Wifi in my case, I’m going out of state where I won’t have WiFi and started to download a 34 module course this morning on my IPhone. Courses take a long time to download. I hit the pause button when I left the house but the app started downloading in my car and ate through 8 GBs of data. You can turn off data from your phone to only use data, but I thought since I hit the pause button I’d be safe. Well, like the Great Courses, there’s a learning curve....I otherwise highly recommend the Great Courses.

I love the content, but the app still needs improvement. Most of these should be easily fixable.

1) The UI needs to be better. The controls for fast forward and rewind are too close to other buttons. Hence, I keep going to the previous lecture instead of just rewinding. Similarly, it is really hard to move the playhead when playing audio courses. Please pay attention to small, easily fixable details to make user experience more pleasant.

2) The app is very slow to start and needs Internet connection (even if I have downloaded the content ahead of time). I need to open the app with Internet connection until I can access my courses.

This is a major annoyance and the primary reason for my low rating. Often, I try to watch the content when commuting with poor internet connectivity (most urban public transportation nws). If you really need to authenticate the user, do it on a schedule and don't force the user to authenticate when they open the app every time.

3) For some reason, the app takes up lot of space even after I delete all the downloaded videos. I have a lot courses and I had to delete the app and reinstall to really free up the space. Please ensure that space is freed up after the user deletes the video (or fix whatever issue that is causing this problem).

I love the content, but the app needs to improve.

I give this a three because while it works, there are a lot of bugs and missing obvious features.

At least using downloaded material - which is how I usually use this - there are a number of flaws.

1.) The worst is the app loses track of where I am in watching. I can watch a lecture halfway through, and later the app has lost track of that.

2.) The app “restarts” when returning to it from background. While that is normally just a little lost time, problem 1 kicks in, and I have to hunt for where I left off.

3.) I have seen where if the iPad Wi-Fi is turned on, but there is no network to which it fully connects, downloaded material does not appear as downloaded. Wi-Fi must be turned off to get the app to see it.

4.) If Wi-Fi is on, but there is no network to connect to, a long delay occurs while the app tries unsuccessfully to connect.

5.) I love that I can get the manual. I hate that there is no search function.

Love the content, but I think I prefer just loading it into iTunes. The downside is losing where I was between apps, but that really doesn’t work well for me anyway, since I almost always use downloaded material. As noted above, your app doesn’t even keep track of that on an individual device, let alone across devices. Audible’s app does a great job with this.

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

You figure if you download courses on your phone you will be able to watch them offline, like on a plane, right? Forget it. It won’t work. This is what will happen. You will download a bunch of course content, consuming memory on your iPhone. You’ll test it after turning on airplane mode and disconnecting from all networks and discover it works fine. You’ll board a plane and once airborne launch the app and have it demand you log in fresh, which you can’t do without a network. Nice. So you can’t watch your content. If you’re on a plane with wifi as I was, you can connect to it long enough to log in, disconnect from wifi, and then you can watch your downloaded content Great! Except you can’t. The app dies about every 3 to 4 minutes. What a worthless piece of crap. Who offers the ability to download content then denies the ability to watch it without a network connection?

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.