The Great Courses

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.

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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

For years, the interface of this app relied on tiny little control areas that it was almost impossible to hit consistently. I’d try to skip back 15 seconds and nothing would happen - or I’d accidentally end up back at the beginning of the lecture. Now there’s a big screen during listening with well separated controls. Actually usable (though they could be more sensitive - I find they often don’t respond) Also new and very welcome in this version: Speed controls and the ability to change how far skip forward and back go - independently at that! The download screen doesn’t seem to have changed, at least visually. It historically also had touch problems - you’d have to hit the download icon just right or you simply opened or closed the lecture description. I don’t know yet if this has been improved. Maybe if it has we’d be at 5 stars. It’s worth mentioning an older improvement. A year or so back, I’d keep running into cases where a downloaded lecture just would not play; or it would play with gaps in the sound. The streaming version would work fine. I don’t know when this was fixed - it was just frequent enough to be annoying - but I haven’t run into it in quite some time. Overall, with this version, the app is at last quite good for its intended purpose.

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.