Designed to meet the powerful demand for lifelong learning, The Great Courses is an intellectual engaging series of video and audio courses led by the world's best professors and experts in diverse fields such as philosophy, history, literature, science, and the arts. The Great Courses currently maintains a catalog of more than 350 courses delivered by great teachers from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and more.
We work closely with our customers and professors to create every single Great Course. Here's how we do it:
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Customers Choose the Professor:We begin with the most engaging professors—the top 1% as determined by The Great Courses and its customers. In the end, only 1 in 5,000 professors meets the standards set by our customers, who vote on all professors we retain.
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Customers Choose the Course: We interview thousands of customers to find out what courses they want and how they want them made.
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Professors Carefully Craft the Course: Months of preparation ensure that a course will satisfy our customers. Long before a word is spoken on stage, our professor outlines and prepares each lecture and writes the extensive Course Guidebook.
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We Record the Course: Working in our in-house recording studios, we record the video of each lecture on high-definition-quality equipment and media, or record the audio of each lecture on the latest CD-quality equipment and media. We then devote weeks to include dynamic visual elements into the video lectures and to professionally master the sound for the audio lectures.
Our Sales
There's always a sale at The Great Courses. We call it The Great Deal, and here's how it works:
- Every single one of our more than 300 courses goes on sale at least once a year!
- You enjoy savings as high as 70% off the full list price!
Why do we do this?
The answer is simple. By producing large quantities of only the sale courses, we keep our costs down and pass the savings on to you. This approach also enables us to fill your order immediately—99% of all orders ship within 24 hours.
When on sale, our typical course on CD is $54.95 for 12 CDs, or 12 hours of content. That's only $4.58 per CD. Compare $4.58 to what you pay elsewhere for a CD—$20? More? In any format, our courses costs much less than most audiobooks, DVDs, or CDs.
Our Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee
Every single Great Course you order comes with a Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee.
If a course is ever less than completely satisfying, you may exchange it for another or we will refund your money promptly. If a disc ever breaks, warps, or gets damaged, we'll replace it as long as the course is in print. Absolutely free.
Most publishers don't guarantee your satisfaction with their books or recordings, but we do. Why? Because we want you to be our customer for a lifetime of learning.
This guarantee, which we've honored every day since we were established in 1990, not only protects your investment in learning, it also compels us to produce only great courses—and nothing less.
Here's what one of our customers has to say about our Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee:
"To understand how powerful [The Great Course's Lifetime Satisfaction Guarantee] is, keep in mind what this company sells. These aren't little audio tapes with 30 minutes of fluff, they're HUGE, in-depth, taped lectures from some of the best minds in the country.
"When I saw the guarantee, I was sold. Where's my credit card?
"But there's another reason for the guarantee—ethics. Thomas Rollins, [founder] of [The Great Courses], said his company values clients so much, he simply doesn't want them to have any product they don't absolutely love. In our lively phone conversation, he said, 'We call our lectures The Great Courses and if we don't deliver great courses, we don't deserve the money.'
"Wow! Most people think of customer loyalty as customers being loyal to a business. But how about a business being loyal to customers?"
—Dean Rieck, Direct Marketing magazine