Breaking up my comment because it was "too long" to submit as one (that's a first).
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There are so many factually incorrect claims and contradictions in this piece that I don't even know where to begin. I write this as someone who owns nearly 100 Great Courses (between DVDs and digital copies). I'm also someone who has had the pleasure of taking an in-person college class with a professor whose course I first watched through The Great Courses (abbreviated as TGC from here on down).
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> Company recruiters sit in on classes of professors who have won awards or been recognized for their teaching; the most promising are invited to the Great Courses headquarters to record an audition lecture. That recording then goes to the company’s most valued customers. If enough of them like it, the company asks the professor to create a lecture course.
> The very fact that the Great Courses has found professors who teach without self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is sometimes supposed. But the firm’s 200-plus faculty make up a minute percentage of the country’s college teaching corps. And some Great Courses lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claims Guelzo, that “if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm.” Further, it isn’t clear that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home campuses.
I've spoken with multiple professors who have had their college courses adapted into TGC. For the professor whose class I took in person, their TGC lectures were literally structured identically to their syllabus. Some of the same jokes in TGC lectures made their way into the classroom (lol).
The in-person filming process for TGC may require multiple trips down to their Virginia studios, especially if we're talking about longer 48+ part courses that reach 24+ hours of screentime. Then there are the occasional re-shoots and restructurings necessary if the their customer focus groups (similar to an Amazon Vine/early reviewer program) finds the content not great.
The idea that professors are creating courses from scratch for TGC is in the overwhelming majority of cases not true. A professor who has normal teaching, research, and service requirements is generally not going to have time to create a whole course from scratch for what the author herself notes is typically a $25,000 royalty per year. A religious scholar who I spoke with (eventually decided not to go forward with submitting an audition tape) said that in his mind the biggest value prop of TGC is that you can minimally adapt existing materials to earn a healthy royalty.
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> True, the Great Courses emphasizes breadth over depth and offers largely introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or philosophical schools.
This article was written in 2011, but even then there were already courses available about Voltaire, "The Great Ideas of Philosophy", "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas", "Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition", Alexis De Tocqueville, "Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition", "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida", "Legacies of Great Economists", "The Conservative Tradition", "American Ideals", etc. And yes, I double checked my order receipts to make sure these were actually available at the time. In fact many of these courses were on their 2nd or 3rd edition.
Since then, they've added quite a few STEM courses in multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, statistical computing, complexity theory, college chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.. Several of these are taught at a 2nd year undergrad or ...
> This past academic year, for example, a Bowdoin College student interested in American history courses could have taken “Black Women in Atlantic New Orleans,” “Women in American History, 1600–1900,” or “Lawn Boy Meets Valley Girl: Gender and the Suburbs,” but if he wanted a course in American political history, the colonial and revolutionary periods, or the Civil War, he would have been out of luck.
* American Society in the New Nation, 1763-1840 (Fall 2010)
* Borderlands and Empires in Early North America (Fall 2010)
* The History of African Americans, 1619-1865 (Fall 2012) (announced in the 2011-2011 catalog)
* American Political Development (Spring 2011)
* American Political Thought (Spring 2011)
* Political Parties in the United States (Fall 2010)
* Introduction to American Government (Fall 2010)
...and many many more that I got tired of copying over to this post.
This is incredibly lazy research by the writer. At the time this article went to press ("Summer 2011"), these courses already existed, and there are countless others already pre-announced in the 2011-2012 course catalog (https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...).
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> The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want.
> This repetition occurs not because the company is on a mission to resuscitate the canon but because customers want it. The insatiability of the demand for such courses surprises even the producers themselves.
> But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company’s website.
> The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically celebrate literature’s power.
The author spends a good chunk of the article talking about TGC's customer-centric focus as a key reason for the company's success. TGC largely films courses that its customers want!
Yet, the singular piece of evidence she offers that undergrads are having unpopular curriculums pushed upon them is what she herself deems as an "assertion" from a singular professor. It's difficult to square the "excesses" of student protests against what they see as Western-centric canon (a pet topic that the author has written extensively about) with the idea that students actually really do want to learn about a suppressed canon.
Could it possibly be that today's generation might want a greater variety of course offerings beyond the classical Western canon? Could it be that TGC's median customer, who skews older, has different intellectual preferences and tastes from someone who is 30-40 years younger? What happened to...
Thank you a lot for your comment! I could tell from the tone of the article that the person writing it was clearly biased, but I didn't realize how far they have stretched their narrarive.
City Journal is ostensibly about cities but is actually a conservative think tank. They are out to show that academia is being taken over by Cultural Marxists and that the custodians of great Western canon have fled to private industry.
The irony in that customer trying to advance his knowledge and at the same time complaining about Noam Chomsky. I would order a ridiculous spicy pizza on his home address if I was that professor.
Thank you for this review of the article that I posted. I really appreciate the effort and the information that you've put in here.
I love the Great Courses, and have spent a lot of money on them. I wish I'd shared a more accurate article on them now, as an addled account can't help them all that much.
I was happy to write this, since The Great Courses have had such a big impact on my learning. I was just frustrated that what could've been a nice profile (given how much access the author had to the company and its leadership) turned into an ideological screed. IMO, Heather MacDonald sees herself and/or functions as more of a commentator/activist than journalist.
The NY Times has done some fun looks at The Great Courses over the years:
It's truly a remarkable company. It has reinvented itself multiple times: physical DVDs, online downloads, Netflix style streaming, and now audio partnerships with Audible. The recent lifestyle additions (partnerships with NatGeo and Culinary Institute of America) have been great too.
It's been equally remarkable that the Big History was so well regarded that Bill Gates and Khan Academy then went ahead and spun it out into its own standalone project (https://www.bighistoryproject.com/).
> (A Great Courses lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate his performance; the base royalty is 4 percent of the course’s gross revenue, but that rate can rise to 6 percent if a course receives high enough evaluations. The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course.)
The Great Courses likes to say that they have a very low "acceptance rate". Maybe a hundred professors are considered for each course that actually makes it to market.
The royalty for older courses will also naturally decay once the content goes "stale".
> The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course
> A Great Courses lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate his performance; the base royalty is 4 percent of the course’s gross revenue, but that rate can rise to 6 percent if a course receives high enough evaluations.
25k being 6%, would mean the average course has gross revenue of about 416K per year. Impressive
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 38.5 ms ] thread----
There are so many factually incorrect claims and contradictions in this piece that I don't even know where to begin. I write this as someone who owns nearly 100 Great Courses (between DVDs and digital copies). I'm also someone who has had the pleasure of taking an in-person college class with a professor whose course I first watched through The Great Courses (abbreviated as TGC from here on down).
-------------------------------------------
> Company recruiters sit in on classes of professors who have won awards or been recognized for their teaching; the most promising are invited to the Great Courses headquarters to record an audition lecture. That recording then goes to the company’s most valued customers. If enough of them like it, the company asks the professor to create a lecture course.
> The very fact that the Great Courses has found professors who teach without self-indulgence may suggest that academia is in better shape than is sometimes supposed. But the firm’s 200-plus faculty make up a minute percentage of the country’s college teaching corps. And some Great Courses lecturers feel so marginalized on their own campuses, claims Guelzo, that “if the company granted tenure, they would scramble to abandon their current ships and sleep on couches to work for the firm.” Further, it isn’t clear that the Great Courses professors teach the same way back on their home campuses.
I've spoken with multiple professors who have had their college courses adapted into TGC. For the professor whose class I took in person, their TGC lectures were literally structured identically to their syllabus. Some of the same jokes in TGC lectures made their way into the classroom (lol).
The in-person filming process for TGC may require multiple trips down to their Virginia studios, especially if we're talking about longer 48+ part courses that reach 24+ hours of screentime. Then there are the occasional re-shoots and restructurings necessary if the their customer focus groups (similar to an Amazon Vine/early reviewer program) finds the content not great.
The idea that professors are creating courses from scratch for TGC is in the overwhelming majority of cases not true. A professor who has normal teaching, research, and service requirements is generally not going to have time to create a whole course from scratch for what the author herself notes is typically a $25,000 royalty per year. A religious scholar who I spoke with (eventually decided not to go forward with submitting an audition tape) said that in his mind the biggest value prop of TGC is that you can minimally adapt existing materials to earn a healthy royalty.
-------------------------------------------
> True, the Great Courses emphasizes breadth over depth and offers largely introductory material. In literature and intellectual history, the survey format predominates, with relatively few courses on individual writers or philosophical schools.
This article was written in 2011, but even then there were already courses available about Voltaire, "The Great Ideas of Philosophy", "The Modern Political Tradition: Hobbes to Habermas", "Religious Debate in the Western Intellectual Tradition", Alexis De Tocqueville, "Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition", "The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida", "Legacies of Great Economists", "The Conservative Tradition", "American Ideals", etc. And yes, I double checked my order receipts to make sure these were actually available at the time. In fact many of these courses were on their 2nd or 3rd edition.
Since then, they've added quite a few STEM courses in multivariable calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, statistical computing, complexity theory, college chemistry, organic chemistry, etc.. Several of these are taught at a 2nd year undergrad or ...
Take a look at the Bowdoin course catalog for the 2010-2011 academic year (https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...).
We see courses in:
* The Civil War Era (Fall 2011)
* History of the American West (Fall 2011)
* American Society in the New Nation, 1763-1840 (Fall 2010)
* Borderlands and Empires in Early North America (Fall 2010)
* The History of African Americans, 1619-1865 (Fall 2012) (announced in the 2011-2011 catalog)
* American Political Development (Spring 2011)
* American Political Thought (Spring 2011)
* Political Parties in the United States (Fall 2010)
* Introduction to American Government (Fall 2010)
...and many many more that I got tired of copying over to this post.
This is incredibly lazy research by the writer. At the time this article went to press ("Summer 2011"), these courses already existed, and there are countless others already pre-announced in the 2011-2012 course catalog (https://digitalcommons.bowdoin.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...).
-------------------------------------------
> The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want.
> This repetition occurs not because the company is on a mission to resuscitate the canon but because customers want it. The insatiability of the demand for such courses surprises even the producers themselves.
> But the incursions of identity studies and other post-sixties academic developments remain minimal—and are inevitably denounced by some customers on the company’s website.
> The biggest question raised by the Great Courses’ success is: Does the curriculum on campuses look so different because undergraduates, unlike adults, actually demand postcolonial studies rather than the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Every indication suggests that the answer is no. “If you say to kids, ‘We’re doing the regendering of medieval Europe,’ they’ll say, ‘No, let’s do medieval kings and queens,’” asserts Allitt. “Most kids want classes on the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, World War I, and the American Civil War.” Creative writing is such a popular concentration within the English major, Lerer argues, because it is the one place where students encounter attention to character and plot and can non-ironically celebrate literature’s power.
The author spends a good chunk of the article talking about TGC's customer-centric focus as a key reason for the company's success. TGC largely films courses that its customers want!
Yet, the singular piece of evidence she offers that undergrads are having unpopular curriculums pushed upon them is what she herself deems as an "assertion" from a singular professor. It's difficult to square the "excesses" of student protests against what they see as Western-centric canon (a pet topic that the author has written extensively about) with the idea that students actually really do want to learn about a suppressed canon.
Could it possibly be that today's generation might want a greater variety of course offerings beyond the classical Western canon? Could it be that TGC's median customer, who skews older, has different intellectual preferences and tastes from someone who is 30-40 years younger? What happened to...
I love the Great Courses, and have spent a lot of money on them. I wish I'd shared a more accurate article on them now, as an addled account can't help them all that much.
The NY Times has done some fun looks at The Great Courses over the years:
* https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/business/born-in-the-vcr-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/arts/television/the-great...
The Washington Post did a profile a few years back:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/before-you...
It's truly a remarkable company. It has reinvented itself multiple times: physical DVDs, online downloads, Netflix style streaming, and now audio partnerships with Audible. The recent lifestyle additions (partnerships with NatGeo and Culinary Institute of America) have been great too.
It's been equally remarkable that the Big History was so well regarded that Bill Gates and Khan Academy then went ahead and spun it out into its own standalone project (https://www.bighistoryproject.com/).
At that rate you could make quite a living after having created a dozen course.
> (A Great Courses lecturer earns a royalty that varies according to how highly viewers rate his performance; the base royalty is 4 percent of the course’s gross revenue, but that rate can rise to 6 percent if a course receives high enough evaluations. The average royalty is about $25,000 a year for a course.)
The Great Courses likes to say that they have a very low "acceptance rate". Maybe a hundred professors are considered for each course that actually makes it to market.
The royalty for older courses will also naturally decay once the content goes "stale".
25k being 6%, would mean the average course has gross revenue of about 416K per year. Impressive