#866 overall
Big History
The Great Courses
1 recommender · 1 thread · recommended in 1 year, 2020 · score 0.7
Big History is a Great Courses lecture series that surveys history from the Big Bang through the present, covering cosmic, Earth, life, and human history in one narrative. It was later spun out into a standalone project with Bill Gates and Khan Academy.
Commenters point to the series as the kind of well-regarded course that led Bill Gates and Khan Academy to build a standalone Big History project from it.
Humanities & Social Sciencebeginnerpaidvideo lectures#big history#cosmology#world history#great courses#khan academy
Recommendations by year
20062026
I was happy to write this, since The Great Courses have had such a big impact on my learning. I was just frustrated that what could've been a nice profile (given how much access the author had to the company and its leadership) turned into an ideological screed. IMO, Heather MacDonald sees herself and/or functions as more of a commentator/activist than journalist.
The NY Times has done some fun looks at The Great Courses over the years:
* https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/business/born-in-the-vcr-... * https://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/arts/television/the-great...
The Washington Post did a profile a few years back:
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/before-you...
It's truly a remarkable company. It has reinvented itself multiple times: physical DVDs, online downloads, Netflix style streaming, and now audio partnerships with Audible. The recent lifestyle additions (partnerships with NatGeo and Culinary Institute of America) have been great too.
It's been equally remarkable that the Big History was so well regarded that Bill Gates and Khan Academy then went ahead and spun it out into its own standalone project (https://www.bighistoryproject.com/).