About Us

What Does The Great Courses Do?

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 300 courses delivered by great professors from the Ivy League, Stanford, Georgetown, and other leading colleges and universities.

How Long Has The Great Courses Been in Business?

The Great Courses was originally founded in 1990 as The Teaching Company. Since then, we have gone on to sell more than 8 million courses to lifelong learners around the world.

How Do You Choose Your Professors?

There are hundreds of thousands of college professors and subject matter experts around the world. But only a very select few are chosen to be a part of The Great Courses' faculty.

Each year, our professional recruiters identify the top 1% of professors based on teaching awards, published evaluations, newspaper write-ups, and other sources. Then, our team travels to universities and academic institutions—from Harvard to Stanford to UCLA to UNC—and listens to these professors deliver lectures to their students.

Of these few professors, only 1 in 20 is selected to give an audition lecture for The Great Courses. Each audition is then thoroughly reviewed by hundreds of our customers. Those professors who receive a high score are invited to craft a Great Course. In the end, we and our customers choose about 1 in 5,000 professors to create courses for us.

How Do You Make Your Courses?

We work closely with our customers and professors to create every single Great Course. Here's how we do it:

  • Customers Choose the Professor: We begin with the top 1% of professors in America. In the end, only 1 in 5,000 professors meets the standards set by our customers, who vote on all our professors.
  • Customers Choose the Course: We interview thousands of customers to find out what courses they want and how they want them made.
  • 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.
  • We Record the Course: Working in our in-house recording studios in Chantilly, Virginia, we record the video of each lecture on HD-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.

To visit the full library of The Great Courses, please click here.