The Great Courses

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.

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.

Doesn't support basic Split View or pop out video player which makes it difficult to take notes on lectures

I use the app often but I never know what it’s going to do. I keep reinstalling it but it keeps coming up with new glitches.

Forcing TGC buyers to use a subscription (TGC Plus, exWondrium) is just a money grub. Fix it.

Find it odd that I haven’t used this app in months yet this app consumes more cellular data (2.93gb in the past month) than apps that I regularly use and that is including some audio/video apps. Concerning.

I’d give this app a higher rating but it is missing the ability to use Apple Car Play. I listen to the lectures mostly when I’m in the car and it would be so much more helpful to be able to play it on Car Play.

The app and the instructional videos are great, but after upgrading to iPadOS 18, the app lost the ability to use AirPlay to cast to my Apple TV device.

Great Courses has terrific content but the app crashes frequently. Frustrating.

It took a while for Great Courses to support off-line video viewing (on long flights, for example). Problem is it still doesn’t work well, crashing frequently and requiring restarting a course multiple times in short time periods.