The Great Courses

Latest app version just won’t load videos - the app is useless. It’s the one and main thing this app is supposed to do and it just gets stuck on the loading video screen. I can look at the professor bios or even download the study guide in the app, but the videos won’t load or stream. I’d recommend Apple remove this from the store as a dead app. Very disappointed I paid for a bunch of courses and can’t watch them.

Can I please watch the videos that I have already downloaded to my phone without connecting to the internet? App isn’t loading properly and I can’t watch anything because it can’t connect to servers properly. Let me watch what’s on my phone already at the very least

I have to drive occasionally through a five hour cell coverage dead zone so downloaded several courses to listen to. But the app randomly stops playing, showing up as “unknown” device” or just shutting down; once you plow through the steps to get back to the session, it doesn’t remember the session much less where you were; the selection buttons are minuscule (e.g. you can’t just click on the whole title in the play list but rather it a 1squate millimeter arrow to start playing)( the skip-forward button sometimes turns the app off. As much as I wanted to know more about Charlemagne, I gave up after ten attempts to listen to one lesson and listened to music. Worst app I’ve seen, and the great content Great Courses offers deserves better than a Windows 3.1 level experience. Get your act together, folks!

I am already using the Roku app, but when I tried to use the app from the App Store it refuses to let me sign in. I don’t remember setting up the account, but when I initially tried I got an error message “user with e-mail already exists…” or something similar. So, I tried to use “forgot password”, but only get a different error message. It’s probably just as well, as the Roku app is $7 a month. From I can tell, to access a course like “Biblical Hebrew” it’s $340, with the only additional benefit of being able to download the PDF coursebook, which is why I was interested in the app for my iPad. Even if I could afford the $340 it’s impossible to complete the transaction if your app is busted. That’s pretty inexcusable for a 4 year old app, in my opinion.

The coders who made this app should be fired! At least for iPad, totally unusable in offline mode to watch downloaded courses. I used this app on an iPad to download my courses before a flight. When I tried to watch the courses offline on my flight, the app was horrifically unstable and crash nearly 20 times through a single 30 minute lecture. This is all the fault of terrible coding practices by the app developers! Whoever they paid to make this app did a terrible job on the backend code.

I have two iPads (6 Mini and Pro) IOS 16.5 that I have downloaded classes for trips in the past. Had deleted backups on Mini some time ago and four 1/2 hour classes on Pro today. Both still show over 15GB storage usage. Seams extreme! Version 8.2.3(1)

No longer works in my iPhone. Correction: my VPN was creating the problem. After a tech call to Apple we fixed the problem by turning off the VPN and then turning it back on.

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.