The Great Courses

I gladly would give the Courses available here 5 stars! They will fascinate you and make you a more interesting, intelligent person. But the app is not worthy of their greatness. The promise of this app is that you can absorb a lot of courses, watching in multiple settings. It’s best feature is that you can switch between video and audio versions of the courses. However it frequently causes me to lose my place. It does not reliably sync with the Apple TV app so I have stopped using that. Also switching between video and audio occasionally restarts the lesson. Also some useful features for a listening app are absent such as a sleep timer or variable speed playback for audio. These are not necessary but the reliable syncing and keeping track of your progress is a must for the experience that this content deserves. Also the search feature oddly doesn’t always return courses that have the search term in the name of the course.

While we love Great Courses, the app has the following problem. Generally there is no feedback that you have watched one of the lessons. We Chromecast to our TV most of the time. I suspect that the turnover of control to the TV takes the app out of the game. An interrupting phone call, also often leads to trying to find out we we left off. Maybe I need my own button on each session. Seems gross, but if the app can’t track usage, then I need a way.

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.

The app works well online but very very often hangs when in my car out of cell phone service. Very frustrating. The app just spins and does nothing

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)