Flawed
The app does not have at least 1 course I purchased, although the purchased course is available on their website. Since it’s unreliable, I cannot recommend it.
Dr. Wayne Isom
I have purchased over $ 1000 worth of your courses over the years and find it very difficult to stream the courses on my phone. I would need better service to subscribe to your Great Courses plus. I think you will go out of business!
Wayne Isom, MD
Wayne Isom, MD
Glitchy
When offline it will work fine for a while then start asking for you to log in again and will not accept the login data until it reconnects to wifi. Will stop a downloaded file midway. Basically not much use in airplane mode.
Does Not Play Nice with Apple Car Play
Great Courses has made this app even worse. They should fire the people involved. Or maybe they already did, and have just abandoned it. Nothing works. I can’t log in. It don’t let me play downloaded courses without logging in. I don’t want to stream and should not need to log in. Miserable experience.
SECOND 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.
SECOND 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.
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I hope you like typing your password!
The great courses is great. The app is mediocre at best, unless you really like logging back in after taking a week or two off.
