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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

"One could devote a lifetime to the lectures from [The Great Courses], and it would be a life well spent."

—AudioFile Magazine

More Testimonials

What Do You Do With My E-mail Address and Personal Information?

Here's what we do with your e-mail address:

Send you order confirmations.
Send you course starter materials.
Send you free articles.
Collect your feedback on courses and professors.
Notify you of special sale offers.

Here's what we do with your name and mailing address:

Send you our monthly Great Courses catalog.
Send you The Great Courses Magazine, newsletters, and other special sale catalogs

For more information, please visit our full Privacy Policy.

About Us

Who We Are

The Great Courses brings the most engaging professors into your home or car through courses on DVD, audio CD, and other formats. Since 1990, great teachers from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, and more have crafted over 400 courses for lifelong learners. We provide the adventure of learning, without the homework or exams.

Our mission:

To ignite the passion for lifelong learning by offering great courses taught by great professors.

Our values:

Excellence. Start with the best, then make it better.
Cultivate every resource. Confront, accept, and improve hard facts.
Hard work for solid results.
Fair and lasting relationships with our customers and our employees. And expect the same in return.
Integrity. Period.

What we've done:

With input and feedback from our customers since 1990, we've found the most engaging professors from Australia, the UK and America.

With those great professors, we have produced more than 400 great courses—over 6,000 hours of material in literature, philosophy, history, fine arts, the sciences, economics, and religion.

We have delivered millions of lectures to hundreds of thousands of people we are proud to call our customers.

The Great Courses is a trading name of The Teaching Company, 4840 Westfields Blvd, Suite 500, Chantilly, VA 20151-2299.

How The Great Courses Began

The Great Courses was founded as The Teaching Company in 1990 by Thomas M. Rollins, former Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources.

Years earlier, as a Harvard Law School student, Rollins had an unforgettable experience that opened his eyes to the extraordinary power of a great lecturer captured on tape.

Rollins was facing an important exam in the Federal Rules of Evidence but was not well prepared. He managed to obtain videotapes of 10 one-hour lectures by a noted authority on the subject, Professor Irving Younger.

"I dreaded what seemed certain to be boring," Rollins says. "I thought that few subjects could be as dull as the Federal Rules of Evidence. But I had no other way out."

Rollins planted himself in front of the TV and played all 10 hours nearly non-stop. The lectures, he says, "were outrageously insightful, funny, and thorough." Watching Professor Younger's lectures was one of Rollins's best experiences as a student.

Rollins made an "A" in the course. And he never forgot the unique power of recorded lectures by a great teacher.

After many years of government service, Rollins founded The Great Courses in 1990 to ignite people's passion for lifelong learning by offering great courses taught by great professors.

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 the world 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 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.
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 (the Washington, D.C. area), 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.