McLarenblog

It appears that many people are having difficulty listening and viewing The Great Courses on various devices.  I wrote this post when I found that applications for hand held devices, to view and listen to The Great Courses, were getting bad reader reviews.  There is an elegant solution.  It is a bit complicated at first but there are some shortcuts after you go through this process once.  Actually, I found this process quite fast so long as I remembered my log in information.

If you made course purchases from a long time ago, as I did, you might want to ask customer service to put those old courses up on their server.  Call customer support and ask that all your prior purchases be placed into your account as a cloud solution.  The lady that I talked to did this for me for free.  Once your content is in the cloud, you can view and listen using any device that has a web browser such as cell phones, tablets, laptops and desk computers.

This method will bypass downloading any application (Some content can be downloaded but not explained here).  Instead, you will listen and view your courses using your favorite Internet browser.  What this process involves is  to navigate to find “My Digital Library”.  When you buy product from The Great Courses, you also have your own web account.  We will go to that web account and access your digital library and you then can listen and view that content.  Next, are the step by step instructions as to do all this.

Go to their web site: http://www.thegreatcourses.com/

Look upper right of the web page for “My Account”.  The image below shows you what this part of the page looks like.

Mouse click on the words “My Account” and you will be taken to a log in page.

Below is an image of the log in.

Log in using your user name, usually your e-mail address, and password.  Make sure you have selected “I am a returning customer, and my password is”.  Mouse click “Sign In” after you put in your e-mail address and password.  Once you log in, you will see a web page just for you.  BOOK MARK that log in page!   Look along the left side of the web page for “My Digital Library”.

Just below where it shows “My Digital Library” you will see a list of options for you to choose from.  Mouse click on “Stream Courses” if you wish to listen on the device that you are using to log in and you will see the courses ready to hear and view depending upon which course you purchased.  When you select “Stream Courses” the page will change to show what courses you have purchased.  An example of that page is shown below.  Note that we want the “STREAM COURSES” tab selected.

The above web page will show you courses that you can choose to view and listen.  Note that the “Format” column shows that the first item can ONLY be listened to while the titles below can be listened to and viewed.

To see the PLAY function for any listed course, just mouse click on the course name of your choosing.  That course will open up and reveal all the lessons as seen below.  You can jump to any lesson by mouse clicking it.  It then will be ready to be listened to and viewed (if you paid for a viewed product).  I found that the web page offers TWO play buttons.  There is one large one in the screen over the course lesson list and a play button for each lesson to the right side of the screen.  Use the lesson button, as that tells the system which lesson to start.

You can restart any lesson or jump to any other lesson you wish.  You can even scroll forward or backward inside any lesson by using the large dark screen (large dark screen means audio only course) over the lesson lists and using the mouse click on the portion shown below showing lesson progress.  Place your mouse toward the bottom of that dark screen and controls will appear.  Place your mouse pointer at the end of the progress bar and you can slide that back and forth to reposition where the lesson will start again.

Look at the image above.  Note the very small red looking box with the title “Course Guide”.  If that appears on your screen, you can mouse click on that icon and download it into your computer which I strongly recommend.  You can then read along (laptop and desktop only) while the program progresses or read it before or after the lesson.  Just remember that multiple exposure to the same content results in better retention.

I have used the method described above to view and listen to The Great Courses on the following devices:

• Cell Phone:   Using a cell phone is a bit of a pain because the log in screen, already small, needs to be expanded by finger spreading your screen image outward.  Also, your cell phone air charges will apply because you might be listening using cell towers.  If your in a WiFi location, force the phone to use WiFi only.
• NEXIS 7 First Generation:   This worked very well so long as you don’t move the Nexis.  It was very annoying that whenever I moved the Nexis, the web page would change from landscape to portrait or reverse and the stream would stop and reset the content.  There is a control to lock the screen from rotating.  Ultimate Rotation Control.  
• MacBook Air:  Using a laptop or desk computer was by far the best solution.