Is much of college wasted on the young? What would a great university education mean to you now?Now thousands of adult learners Adult learner is a term used to describe any person socially accepted as an adult who is in a learning process, whether it is formal education, informal learning, or corporate-sponsored learning. are finding out, through college courses by top teachers captured on audiotape au·di·o·tape n. 1. A relatively narrow magnetic tape used to record sound for subsequent playback. 2. A tape recording of sound. tr.v. , videotape videotape Magnetic tape used to record visual images and sound, or the recording itself. There are two types of videotape recorders, the transverse (or quad) and the helical. , CD, or DVD DVD: see digital versatile disc. DVD in full digital video disc or digital versatile disc Type of optical disc. The DVD represents the second generation of compact-disc (CD) technology. for enjoyment in your home or car. How often have you looked back on your college learning years and thought about how much more that time would mean to you now? What if you could spend each day in the company of great minds, ideas, events, and insights? For more than a decade, The Teaching Company has been recording the finest lecturing university professors in the world in order to make a vast curriculum in the arts and sciences available to everyone. It adds up to over 1,800 hours of material in literature, philosophy, history, fine arts, and the sciences. If you listened to or watched just one 30-minute lecture each day you would, in one month, complete what would be about 500 pages of course material in written form, roughly two full-sized books. In a year, 6,000 pages of material would be yours. In five years, you'd have absorbed more than a five-foot shelf of the finest university education in the world. And it need never end-we add hundreds of hours of new material each year. Oh, and there is no homework and there are no exams. The joy of learning would become a treasured part of every day and the centerpiece of a life well-lived. "The Teaching Company ... has become a force in adult education by distributing lectures by professors from some of the nations leading universities. --The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times Great Professors Who are the Great Teachers? They are gifted scholars, explainers, enthusiasts, communicators--and, yes, entertainers. Everyone who has ever experienced the sheer pleasure of learning from just one great teacher knows what we mean. There are approximately 425,000 college professors in America. In over a decade of searching, we have selected barely 100 to make The Great Courses. Why only these? Because we seek out only those professors who will make your time in the world of ideas a daily pleasure. How do we find them? Each year we travel the country--Harvard to Stanford, UCLA UCLA University of California at Los Angeles UCLA University Center for Learning Assistance (Illinois State University) UCLA University of Carrollton, TX and Lower Addison, TX to UNC--to watch hundreds of top-rated professors from America's best colleges and universities, in search of the finest. Of the hundreds of professors we visit, only a few dozen of the very best are invited to give an audition audition /au·di·tion/ (aw-dish´un) hearing. chromatic audition color hearing. au·di·tion n. The sense, ability, or power of hearing. lecture. Each audition is reviewed by hundreds of customers. We then select only those professors rated highest by our customers to make The Great Courses. More than 10,000 of our customers--educated, intelligent adults--have voted on audition lectures to select our faculty based on their teaching and lecturing skills. Members of our faculty have won many honors including the, Pulitzer Prize Pulitzer Prize Any of a series of annual prizes awarded by Columbia University for outstanding public service and achievement in American journalism, letters, and music. Fellowships are also awarded. , the Carnegie Foundations
The Carnegie Foundation ("Carnegie Stichting" in Dutch) is an organization based in The Hague, The Netherlands. Professor of the Year award, and Fulbright and Guggenheim Scholarships. But what matters is that they are clear, devoted scholars with a passionate zeal Zeal Bows, Mr. crippled fiddler with intense feelings. [Br. Lit.: Pendennis] Cedric of Rotherwood zealous about restoring Saxon independence. [Br. to teach others what their disciplines have discovered. "The Teaching Company offers only brilliant teaching ... lectures by the best that Harvard, Yale and other top universities have to offer." --The Wall Street Journal The average Great Course scores 8.97 out of 10 Once a professor is selected, each course is crafted--not merely recorded--for the customers of The Teaching Company with the needs of intelligent, engaged adults foremost in mind. Every course is designed to be comprehensive, richly detailed, and extremely well-presented. Recently, an outside service surveyed 3,600 of our customers and asked them to rate the course they had most recently completed on a ten-point scale, where 10 is "extremely satisfying." The average course scored 8.97. Lifelong Learning Lifelong learning is the concept that "It's never too soon or too late for learning", a philosophy that has taken root in a whole host of different organisations. Lifelong learning is attitudinal; that one can and should be open to new ideas, decisions, skills or behaviors. That Fits Your Life Where do our customers find the time to become "renaissance" people in this time-pressed age? Often, they have enriched their lives by taking back "lost" time with The Great Courses. You can use The Great Courses when you commute TO COMMUTE. To substitute one punishment in the place of another. For example, if a man be sentenced to be hung, the executive may, in some states, commute his punishment to that of imprisonment. , exercise, or work around the house. We once asked a heart surgeon who had watched hundreds of hours of lectures how he found the time in his career for The Great Courses. He answered, "I skip the first half hour of junk junk Classic Chinese sailing vessel of ancient unknown origin, still in wide use. High-sterned, with a projecting bow, the junk carries up to five masts on which are set square sails consisting of panels of linen or matting flattened by bamboo strips. TV each evening and watch a Teaching Company lecture instead." Another customer echoes what we have heard many times: "Since I've discovered The Teaching Company, I look forward to my driving time. Thank you for changing my commute from frustrating frus·trate tr.v. frus·trat·ed, frus·trat·ing, frus·trates 1. a. To prevent from accomplishing a purpose or fulfilling a desire; thwart: to fascinating." And many of our customers have made The Great Courses the cornerstone cornerstone Ceremonial building block, dated or otherwise inscribed, usually placed in an outer wall of a building to commemorate its dedication. Often the stone is hollowed out to contain newspapers, photographs, or other documents reflecting current customs, with a view to of a rewarding retirement. "Why the Guarantee?" The price for shipping and handling of our products includes a lifetime satisfaction guarantee. What does this mean? It means that if a course is ever less than completely satisfying, you may exchange it for another or we will refund TO REFUND. To pay back by the party who has received it, to the party who has paid it, money which ought not to have been paid. 2. On a deficiency of assets, executors and administrators cum testamento annexo, are entitled to have refunded to them legacies your money promptly. Most publishers and booksellers do not guarantee that you will be completely satisfied with their product. We do. And we guarantee your satisfaction for a lifetime because we want you to be our customer for a lifetime of learning. One customer published his view of our guarantee, which we have reproduced below: "It was just a plain jane mailer (1) An e-mail program. See e-mail program. (2) A message sent by an e-mail program. (3) A person or organization sending e-mail. from The Teaching Company. They offer taped lectures by prominent professors on subjects that get my heart racing. I remembered receiving mailers from this company before, though I had never purchased anything. As I glanced at this one, though, something caught my eye. They offered a lifetime satisfaction guarantee on every tape in their catalog catalog, descriptive list, on cards or in a book, of the contents of a library. Assurbanipal's library at Nineveh was cataloged on shelves of slate. The first known subject catalog was compiled by Callimachus at the Alexandrian Library in the 3d cent. B.C. . What? I had to read that again. But there it was right on the front page and again on the order form: LIFETIME SATISFACTION GUARANTEE. To understand how powerful this 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, president of The Teaching Company, 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 April 2000 About Value The best college professors in America teach The Great Courses, but you don't pay anything like private school tuition For tuition fees in the United Kingdom, see . Tuition means instruction, teaching or a fee charged for educational instruction especially at a formal institution of learning or by a private tutor usually in the form of one-to-one tuition. to hear or see their lectures. Compare The Great Courses to any other product available: when on sale, our average compact disc (CD) course is $49.95 for 12 CDs, 12 hours. That's only $4.16 per CD. Compare $4.16 for each CD to what you pay elsewhere--$10? Or more? In fact, in any format, these courses are much less than most audiobooks or any other video you can buy. And, with each 6-hour segment of The Great Courses, you receive 50- to 80-page Course Guide Booklets with an in-depth course outline, bibliography bibliography. The listing of books is of ancient origin. Lists of clay tablets have been found at Nineveh and elsewhere; the library at Alexandria had subject lists of its books. , and course summary authored by the professor. This is an exceptional value in educational material, taught by the best professors in America. About Pricing Every course is offered to our customers at its sale price at least once per year; many are offered on sale even more often. Frankly, most of our courses do not sell in large numbers; only a small percentage of Americans are interested in higher learning higher learning n. Education or academic accomplishment at the college or university level. . To make our courses available at exceptional values, we put a fraction of our courses on sale at a given time, they sell in larger numbers than usual, and we can make large batches of them economically. We then pass those savings on to our customers by putting those courses on sale for up to 70% off. Why you should start today The exceptional value in the offer at the bottom of this page is available for a limited time to introduce you to The Great Courses. Call or write us today with your order. You'll receive your Course Starter Materials and your order confirmation via e-mail just minutes after placing your order. Your tapes or discs will arrive in just a few days. Next week your car or living room can become one of the best classrooms in the world. At the bottom of this page is a perfect example of what we mean, chosen from our extensive curriculum in the Sciences, and offered to you now at an exceptional value until January 5, 2004. THE TEACHING COMPANY [R] The Joy of Lifelong Learning Every Day GREAT TEACHERS, GREAT COURSES, GREAT VALUE GUARANTEED. |
|
||||||||||||
Printer friendly
Cite/link
Email
Feedback
Reader Opinion