I got a catalog the other day from The Great Courses (TGC). I’ve always been tempted by those things, the course descriptions make my mouth water, but the prices! Aha! But this is a sale catalog! There are some really good deals in there so I started to fill up my shopping cart. Even with the sale going, it added up to over $400…
SIGH. I can’t do it, as much as I’d like to I just can’t. Hmm, maybe one or two… I started to wonder about alternatives and I remembered iTunesU. It’s a frequently overlooked part of iTunes, but it’s wonderful. College lectures from all sort of places, including heavy hitters like Oxford, MIT, Cal Tech, etc. I’ve long been a fan of the offerings from Mises.org (still the best things to listen to if you’re interested in economics) but I had forgotten about the other stuff from iTunesU.
The best thing of course is that it’s free. I’ve watched some videos on quantum mechanics and quantum computing so far. I’m hoping to do some more physics based stuff before too long and I’ll probably get back to some economics as well. So what does The Great Courses offer in comparison? Ironically, there may be too much stuff in iTunesU. It can be difficult to find what you’re looking for. Some of the lectures TGC offer on early Christianity sound really interesting, trying to find something similar in iTunesU is proving to be frustrating. There’s lots of Christian schools that have their own lecture series but they tend to be long on evangelizing and convincing and short on academic, historical interest. TGC is nice because it is really easy to find what you’re looking for. Or, at least it is easy to see what they offer and make a decision. That might actually be worth the asking price in some situations. I think I am going to spend more time on iTinesU and see if I can exhaust what’s there before springing for a DVD set from TGC. Check out iTunesU, there’s a whole world of knowledge there.