A Great Courses Plus Alternative in Five Minutes
Hour-long lectures hard to fit into your day? See how The Great Courses Plus compares with five-minute history stories you can finish on a commute.
If you are looking for a Great Courses Plus alternative, you probably like the idea of learning history from people who know it well. You may also have found that a long lecture is hard to start on a busy day. This page compares the two formats honestly, so you can choose the one that fits the way you live.
What The Great Courses Plus is and who it suits
The Great Courses Plus is a subscription streaming service from The Teaching Company. By its own description, it offers a very large library of lectures by professors and other experts. History is one of many subjects, next to science, philosophy, travel and more. It runs on the web, on mobile apps and on TV apps.
Think about what this gives you. An expert who knows one subject well teaches it in a series of lectures. You get careful teaching without a campus or an exam.
This suits a reader with time and a settled place to watch. Say you have an evening free, a TV in the living room and a wish to learn the whole story of the Roman Republic. A professor's series is a good way to do that. If you like long, careful teaching and you enjoy following an argument for a long stretch, this library is a strong choice, and nothing here replaces it.
Where long lectures do not fit
Now think about a different day. You have twenty minutes on a train, and the train is crowded. Or you have ten minutes before a meeting. Or you are cooking and you can only listen in pieces. A long lecture asks you to give it a block of time. If you cannot, you stop halfway, and the next day you do not remember where you were.
That is the real problem for many people. They do not lack interest in history. They lack a format that survives a day full of interruptions. Three things go wrong with long lectures on a commute:
- The start is expensive. You must find the series, find your place and remember what was said before.
- The end is far away. If you step off the train at minute twenty, you stop in the middle of a point.
- The pace is set for a classroom. A professor can spend ten minutes on background because the class has an hour.
A short format solves these three things by design. You press play, you hear one whole story, and you stop at its natural end.
What History9 does instead
History9 tells world history in five-minute stories. Each one opens on a person or a moment, adds concrete detail and dates, and ends with one clear takeaway about why it mattered. The narrator is a historian from the past, warm and sometimes wry. When the evidence is disputed, the story says so. There are no exams.
The stories come in tracks of lessons, so a short session still sits inside a longer thread. Here is a worked example from the track called Copernicus to Newton, whose lessons include:
- Why Copernicus waited until his deathbed to publish.
- Tycho Brahe's nose and the best data in Europe.
- Galileo's telescope and his trial.
- Newton, the apple and the plague year.
- The Royal Society and the idea of experiment.
Together these make a short run of sessions. But look at what these stories carry. One man hesitates to print an idea that moves the Earth. Another man gathers careful measurements without a good theory to explain them. A third points a telescope at the sky and gets in trouble. A fourth finds the law that ties it together. Then a society of curious people agrees that claims must be tested. By the fifth story you can explain how people moved from a world with the Earth at the centre to the habit of experiment.
You did not need a free evening. You needed five minutes, five times.
To see where this track sits in the longer story, read our guide from the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution.
Side by side
| The Great Courses Plus | History9 | |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Many subjects, history among them | World history only |
| Format | Recorded lectures by professors and experts | Told stories with pictures and a narrator |
| Time per session | A lecture, with length set by each course | Five minutes |
| Depth in one sitting | Lecture courses that take a topic at length | One story and one takeaway |
| Device | Web, mobile and TV apps | Phone and the web |
| Language level | Teaching by professors and experts | Plain words for readers with no history background |
| Price model | Subscription | Subscription |
| Best for | Long, focused study at a set time | Short gaps in a busy day |
Who should pick which
Pick The Great Courses Plus if you want a professor's full argument, you have longer blocks of time, and you enjoy watching on a larger screen. It is built for study.
Pick History9 if your free time comes in small pieces. Pick it if you want to build knowledge story by story, with a clear path and no homework.
The two can work together. A five-minute story can make you curious, and a long lecture series can then give you the full treatment of a topic you now care about. Many readers find that a short story is the best way to decide which long series is worth their evening.
If you are comparing several options, our list of the best history apps for adults puts them side by side.
Questions people ask
Are five-minute lessons too shallow to learn anything?
A short lesson cannot cover everything, but it can teach one thing well. Each story ends with a takeaway, and the tracks link the stories into a chain. After a track on one theme you can explain how it happened.
Does History9 use professors?
The stories are narrated in the voice of a historian from the past. They are written to be accurate and to say when the evidence is disputed. If you want a particular scholar's own words, a lecture series is the right place.
Can I use it while I walk?
The lessons are short so that they fit a walk or a commute. Each one is narrated, so you can follow along with the screen only now and then.
Can I try it before I pay?
Check the History9 app page for how trying a lesson works. The Great Courses Plus describes a free trial on its own site, so you can compare both.
Learn this in five minutes
Try the track Copernicus to Newton. Its stories show how a few stubborn people changed what we know about the sky, and how the idea of experiment began.