Building a course with The Great Courses

[EKT]

I checked out The Great Courses Master Class List thread above and it's inspiring! (I'm new to The Great Courses.)

One course I'm considering is European Art History. (This would be for a fine arts credit--art history.) I can see that the course includes 48 lectures (about 30 minutes each) and it comes with a downloadable guidebook that is 376 pages in length. (I'm not exactly sure what happens in the guidebook? Is it like a textbook with additional readings, or is it more for guided notetaking? It's not very clear in the description. Are there assignments in the guidebooks?)

I guess I'm mainly wondering if I'll have to supplement a Great Course with an additional text of some kind (and come up with my own assignments), or if the video lectures, guidebook work, and typical discussion/notes/response writing would yield enough content for a student to earn 1.0 credit. (This course might be more like 0.5 credits? Again, it's hard to know without understanding what the guidebook contains.)

Also: How long do courses typically remain on sale? (I would pay the sale price of $69.95 for this course, but I would not be able to pay the $500.00 full price for it!) Thanks!

[regentrude]

Great Courses go on sale all the time. Just wait for a low price.
The guidebooks for the courses we had were basically outlines of the lectures, with some added reading assignments.
I have used a variety of GC for our classes, sometimes with additional textbooks and reading, sometimes (music) with additional performances.
 

If you are planning Art History, it's an elective and there is no standardized canon, so you are pretty much free to do whatever you want. A common rule of thumb for self-designed course would be approximately 120 hours for one credit, give or take. So, if there are 24 hours of lectures, you'd need some other stuff to flesh it out.

Please remember, there are no transcript police. Nobody will check up on you or count your hours. You have a lot more freedom than you think you have.

[Lucy the Valiant]

Libraries often have them, too, so you can preview! 

[Garga]

The guidebooks are all over the place, in my experience.

One was like a workbook with all sorts of fill in the blank and short answer questions.

Another had some short answer questions.

One, for photography, ended with assignments after each lecture. 

Another had short answer questions that were pretty hard to answer; too hard for my student and a bit of a puzzle for me as well. 🙂

And I don’t think they all provided answers to the questions, so you wouldn’t know if your answer was right or wrong.

Wait until you get the course and see if the guidebook will work for you. Be prepared mentally that it won’t work for you. 

I liked to fill in the usual 120 hours for a 1 credit course (60 for .5) So, whenever I got a Great Course, I would supplement with other things that would fill up the hours. I didn’t do it to waste time or fill in the hours with busy work, but I supplemented with valuable activities/books/etc to round out the course. 

Edited May 8, 2021 by Garga

[EKT]

So helpful, thank you all!

[Alte Veste Academy]

In my experience, the newer courses have better guides that round out courses more fully. This course is from 2005, so the guide itself is just a restatement of the lecture, as regentrude said. At the end of every lesson in the guide, however, are some useful things that could be fleshed out. For starters, every work discussed in the lecture is listed, so they would be easy to look up online for further/closer viewing. Then there is suggested reading, but it's generally for whole books, sometimes enormous volumes, so he's not really narrowing things down for explicit study. 

There are useful questions for discussion or to make a weekly assignment/essay from. I would make good use of these for sure. 

For Lesson 1: 

1. Differentiate between the terms interpretation and style as used in the lecture.

2. Think of a work of art that has spoken to you in some way and try to explain its attraction.

For Lesson 2: 

1. What function did narrative art serve, whether religious or secular, in the early Middle Ages?

2. What similarities and differences can you identify in the architecture and decoration of the Byzantine Church of S. Vitale and Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel?

For Lesson 3: 

1. What were the primary cultural, political, and historical influences on Romanesque art forms? 

2. Identify the various parts of Romanesque churches and describe their primary functions. 

We use a lot of GC and find that it's well worth it to subscribe to The Great Courses Plus. I don't think they have every GC, but they have tons, and if you do a free trial, you can preview every guidebook to see what might be worth it for you in terms of buying them or just subscribing to the GC+ site. My DS14 practically lives on them for school these days. He knows the craziest details of obscure history stuff. This week for history we are listening to the audio of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II, and he's constantly stopping it and telling me more about whatever was brought up. The Pacific Theater of WWII is his current fascination, and the things he knows... 😄 

[wendyroo]

4 hours ago, EKT said:

One course I'm considering is European Art History. (This would be for a fine arts credit--art history.) I can see that the course includes 48 lectures (about 30 minutes each) and it comes with a downloadable guidebook that is 376 pages in length. (I'm not exactly sure what happens in the guidebook? Is it like a textbook with additional readings, or is it more for guided notetaking? It's not very clear in the description. Are there assignments in the guidebooks?)

We subscribe to Great Courses Plus, so we have access to most of their titles.

I just looked up the course book for European Art History.

For each lecture, there are 5 or 6 pages of lecture notes. These are just the lecture summarized in paragraph form. Then there is a page of "Works Discussed" listing artists, titles, sizes, media, etc.

Then there are two "Questions to Consider". To give you an idea of the types of questions, here they are from a random lecture near the middle of the course: "1. We have studied several paintings depicting mythological subjects. How does Bernini’s sculptural medium change the presentation of
the subject? 2. How does Bernini unify the elements of the Baldacchino in his design?" There are no answers provided for these questions.

At the end of the guide book, there is supplemental material: a 9 page timeline of art history and major world events, a 9 page glossary, and 16 pages of biographical notes on artists that were covered.

[EKT]

11 hours ago, wendyroo said:

We subscribe to Great Courses Plus, so we have access to most of their titles.

I just looked up the course book for European Art History.

For each lecture, there are 5 or 6 pages of lecture notes. These are just the lecture summarized in paragraph form. Then there is a page of "Works Discussed" listing artists, titles, sizes, media, etc.

Then there are two "Questions to Consider". To give you an idea of the types of questions, here they are from a random lecture near the middle of the course: "1. We have studied several paintings depicting mythological subjects. How does Bernini’s sculptural medium change the presentation of
the subject? 2. How does Bernini unify the elements of the Baldacchino in his design?" There are no answers provided for these questions.

At the end of the guide book, there is supplemental material: a 9 page timeline of art history and major world events, a 9 page glossary, and 16 pages of biographical notes on artists that were covered.

Wow; thank you so much for providing this! Much appreciated!

[EKT]

11 hours ago, Alte Veste Academy said:

In my experience, the newer courses have better guides that round out courses more fully. This course is from 2005, so the guide itself is just a restatement of the lecture, as regentrude said. At the end of every lesson in the guide, however, are some useful things that could be fleshed out. For starters, every work discussed in the lecture is listed, so they would be easy to look up online for further/closer viewing. Then there is suggested reading, but it's generally for whole books, sometimes enormous volumes, so he's not really narrowing things down for explicit study. 

There are useful questions for discussion or to make a weekly assignment/essay from. I would make good use of these for sure. 

For Lesson 1: 

1. Differentiate between the terms interpretation and style as used in the lecture.

2. Think of a work of art that has spoken to you in some way and try to explain its attraction.

For Lesson 2: 

1. What function did narrative art serve, whether religious or secular, in the early Middle Ages?

2. What similarities and differences can you identify in the architecture and decoration of the Byzantine Church of S. Vitale and Charlemagne's Palatine Chapel?

For Lesson 3: 

1. What were the primary cultural, political, and historical influences on Romanesque art forms? 

2. Identify the various parts of Romanesque churches and describe their primary functions. 

We use a lot of GC and find that it's well worth it to subscribe to The Great Courses Plus. I don't think they have every GC, but they have tons, and if you do a free trial, you can preview every guidebook to see what might be worth it for you in terms of buying them or just subscribing to the GC+ site. My DS14 practically lives on them for school these days. He knows the craziest details of obscure history stuff. This week for history we are listening to the audio of Doris Kearns Goodwin's No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, The Home Front in World War II, and he's constantly stopping it and telling me more about whatever was brought up. The Pacific Theater of WWII is his current fascination, and the things he knows... 😄 

Thank you so much for the course info you provided and for the free trial suggestion; that is a really good idea. 

And I love hearing that about your son! I can definitely see how GC could just become a staple in our homeschool. Thanks for all of the ideas!

[EKS]

I just watched the first few minutes of the first lecture on GC+ and the lecturer doesn't have any obvious quirks that would make it a no-go in this house.  That's actually saying something!

 

[EKT]

1 minute ago, EKS said:

I just watched the first few minutes of the first lecture on GC+ and the lecturer doesn't have any obvious quirks that would make it a no-go in this house.  That's actually saying something!

 

Ha! Thank you!! That is helpful. 🙂

[RootAnn]

If your library has it, I recommend adding How to Look at and Understand Great Art. It is a short (36 - 30 min lessons) but good Great Course to begin your first art elective.

[Miss Tick]

If you aren't ready to dive in to GC+, I have often found individual courses available on Amazon for much less than the lowest price I find at Great Courses. Often they are from various Friends of ***** Library.

I did a middle grades art history class at co-op a couple of years ago. (It seems like i was able to find that GC guide book online, if you want to look into it yourself.) Nope, it was "How to Look at and Understand Great Art"

[stripe]

Kanopy also has some. You may be able to access via your library.

[pinball]

I was also going to suggest a subscription to GC+

Other things to add to the course might be (depending on your locale’s Covid situation and your comfort level) are trips to galleries and museums. 

Or your locale might have outdoor statues and monuments that coordinate with a particular area or artists.

[stripe]

Many museums have online collections. The Louvre just made all of theirs available. (That’s nearly half a million pieces.)