Wondrium - Learning & Courses Reviews

I love Wondrium and service. I like that new content is being added and I particularly like the audio-only mode. I will be a subscriber for long time, but have three more (necessary) usability requests and two suggestions. (1) allow users to browse Wondrium while audio programs are playing. Right now, the only way to browse for other content within Wondrium is to stop the program. This does not follow the iOS HIG. Also, please change the player to the native iOS media players. (2) performance improvements, particularly background battery drain. I’m unsure why Wondrium is such a battery hog, even when content is downloaded in the background. (3) for browsing, a better system is needed. I’d suggest filtering options (including one for “percent seen.” The current “Netflix” style of browsing is painful and slow. These are just ideas, but I think they would be awesome to add after the usability problems have been addressed! (4) note-taking during content and live closed captioning should be added and integrated for future reference, given the service’s educational focus, this would be a boon for studying or looking back on past materials. (5) ratings and reviews for content, simple thumbs up, thumbs down. Would help in finding quality content when there is overlap in available programming.

Sometimes it doesn’t sync properly across devices, starting further back in a lecture than where you left off - and sometimes you can’t even fast forward to where you were; it just keeps jumping back, forcing you to re-watch parts you’ve already heard. You can’t download just the audio, only video, which is not too convenient if you are listening while driving unless you want to get a ticket for watching video while driving, because you can’t switch the downloaded video to audio only. Exit Wondrium and when you go back you have to navigate back manually to where you left off, it does not automatically show the lecture you were on and offer to continue. It doesn’t even have the course you are on on the front page when Wondrium opens. If you exit Wondrium while watching a video to, say, read a message or google something, it stops playing; you have to manually switch to audio only then exit Wondrium to keep listening. So, several frustrating clunky inconveniences or bugs, but I’m enjoying the content of my first course.

There are so many courses on the Great Courses Plus! I love that I can download them to my phone for offline listening on long car trips. No matter what your interest is there’s probably a course, or several, on here for it. Want to be more knowledgeable about the history and politics of the US? There are several courses for that. Want to be a better parent, or understand the developing brain of your child? There are courses for that. In a college chemistry, physics, statistics, French, or art class and not understanding the concepts? There are courses that’ll help you there.

I had no idea science was so interesting! It always seemed scary but the courses I’ve watched have broken down the information in easy to understand, bite sized chunks. I am a subscriber for life!

Wondrium is great and functions well, apart from two issues: first, it does not allow audio-only downloads. Since I listen to courses primarily at work, where I have spotty cell reception, streaming isn’t an option, and since video stops playing if you exit Wondrium or turn the screen off, I have to listen with my phone unlocked all day, which is not great for my battery life. Second, when I listen to Wondrium it takes over the mini audio controller in the command center on my iPhone, even after I’ve started listening to music or podcasts. I have to restart the phone to get the correct audio source to display again. This also means that features like pausing without having to manually open and go into the appropriate app don’t work properly, whether I’m trying to do it from the lock screen, the command center, or headphone controls. Apart from those issues though, Wondrium works very well, and I’m enjoying listening to lectures a lot.

The quality of the content found here is, in my opinion, unparalleled. Real lectures by the people who know the topic best, actual college professors. Unfortunately, Wondrium is unreliable and is missing some basic features as so many others have noted. The same content from The Great Courses/this app can also be found on audible and I have opted to stream from there until Wondrium works more efficiently. Although it’s going to cost a bit more there depending on how many of their classes you decide to listen to in a month. I am able to listen during my work hours so I burn right through them and have listened to 40-50 of their different classes. Yes, that’s at least a few hundred hours of content I’ve stream but I’ve really enjoyed the lectures. Ive mainly listened to courses on history and music. If you enjoy learning…just about anything… their courses are a great place to start!

To be clear upfront, this low rating does not relate to the content library. If you want academic and instructional content, the catalog is good. My problem is with video playback in Wondrium , which is terrible. I’ve unsubscribed multiple times because it’s such a pain trying to watch video in Wondrium. For some reason, the video plays smoothly but the audio occasionally skips back a couple of seconds such that the audio and video are out of sync. I have to then exit the video and resume it. And I’ve tested to make sure it’s not the videos themselves—I’ve rewound over the bit that skips and it doesn’t skip again in the same place the second time around. It’s also happened in multiple different video series, both on my phone and on my Apple TV despite having deleted and redos loading Wondrium . The only reason I didn’t give Wondrium a one star review is because I suppose it could be worse, but honestly it’s enough to ruin the service for me.

I’m an early adopter of Wondrium and have watched it go downhill. I don’t have this issue with any other of my many streaming services. They need a better datacenter and to fix bugs. While the catalogue is great, using Wondrium on an iPad or AppleTV is often miserable. The sound track gets out of sync and restarting Wondrium doesn’t help. Over a year ago, tech support told me to uninstall and reinstall which is a major pain when using an AppleTV as it will work for a month or so. Sometimes after an update or reinstall Wondrium shows icons for content but when clicked on, there is an error message that it cannot be found. The only fix seems to be to use a web browser to add it to one’s watchlist. Lately I have resorted to downloading lectures on an iPad to watch but they is slow and defeats the purpose of streaming on a TV. I have had this issue with tvOS 14 and 15 and using iPadOS 15 on the latest iPad Mini Gen 6 and even Chrome on an MacBook Pro with 32 gb of ram.

Why am I still unable to view downloaded material?!?

It's obviously a problem because so many people are complaining about it. You need to fix it as soon as possible! You are taking our money for subscriptions every single month, but you are NOT delivering what you promised to deliver; specifically, the ability to view downloaded content when not connected to the Internet.

Are you going to provide partial refunds to all of your subscribers because we are unable to view downloaded content? That's what I'm paying for; however, that's not what I'm getting. You are not giving me what I am paying for.

Please let me know at your earliest convenience, as I've contacted an attorney regarding this breach of contract and he's eager to get moving if there isn't a resolution soon.

Thanks for advance for your cooperation. Looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Regards,

Here we go again. Another subscription app forces paying subscribers to use a faulty "update" that doesn't work and wastes our time.

Newsflash: TGC- You're now in breach of your contract with every single one of your subscribers. Nice job.

Hurry up and fix Wondrium before someone gets frustrated enough to litigate. Going forward, if you're going to force an update, maybe roll something out that doesn't crash and completely ruin your paying users' experience. Just a thought.

Thanks for taking my money every month and wasting my time.

CM

I LOVE the Great Courses and all they have to offer, but Wondrium is only barely functional. Sometimes it works fine, but frequently the videos freeze and won’t load, or else they stop to buffer every few seconds. Then there are the times when the video keeps playing just fine, but the audio goes completely dead or just skips every couple of words. I really, really hope this issue will be fixed, because the content is incredible. It says a lot that I use Wondrium so much in spite of its problems, though I frequently have to give up and try again later if I want things to actually play properly.

Another thing that I would very much love is if the written material for each course could be accessed through Wondrium itself, rather than having to log into the website separately to download the materials. This is a small issue, though, compared with the constantly freezing videos.

Great courses indeed offers great content. However, I am writing this review so that someone at Great Courses might please improve their app. The downloads are mind-numbingly slow. You can’t do anything else on your phone while the downloads are in process or they shut down. And don’t let the phone go into sleep mode because that also shuts down the downloads. And after an average of 8 minutes per course download, make sure you are online before you start watching the downloads, not online content mind you, but the actual downloads have to be verified online before watching or the episode won’t play and your 3 hour flight time is now sans great courses. And I hope you must have tiny fingers and superhuman accuracy as you press icons in Wondrium or else it will kick off a series of processes having nothing to do with your intention. Great Courses, please redesign your app consistent with your great content and over 100$ annual subscription. Please!!

The update promised long awaited features, so I foolishly updated. Without warning, the update requires a password reset. It says that an email will be sent with instructions and a link. The email says it is in response to my request to reset my password. It has no instructions, but does have a link to reset password. Unfortunately, when you click that it just takes you to the login screen with no option to reset. Using either your old password or a new one just gets an identical email.

Hitting “contact customer service” gets an auto reply that they are experiencing high volume (I bet) and will try to get back to me in 72 hours. Weekends don’t count, so I guess I can kiss one of the 4 weeks I have already paid for goodbye. At best. Great.

I have put up with literally years of lags, crashes and delays in adding content from the legacy app. But for twice the price of my next most expensive streaming app, I think it should, you know, work.

I got Wondrium for a road trip and proceeded to download a bunch of lectures (on wifi) for the drive. I then made sure that I turned off the ability of Wondrium to use cellular data and to warn me if it was using cellular data. Wondrium nicely has two options to do that in their settings. About six hours in to the drive, I noticed I had six text messages from Verizon notifying me that I had gone over my data for the month, repeatedly. Despite those settings, Wondrium continued to download content over my cellular network and cost me nearly $70 in data overage fees. I contacted their tech support and they were extremely helpful at first, before going completely silent. They have no longer responded to any of my emails after responding promptly to the first few. I have screenshots and emails of all the exchanges saved on my computer and nobody will help me out.

Plus the lectures that I did get weren't that good anyway. Certainly not worth the $70 I ended up paying.

Unfortunately Wondrium lacks some core usability features which make it very frustrating to use Wondrium . When viewing classes in a list, if you tap into one class for more details, when you return to the list of classes you are forced back to the beginning of the list and always lose your place. This makes me not want to spend very much time exploring Wondrium . Also, when you tap to add a class to your watchlist the wait time is very long. Another frustration is that sometimes when I try to download a class guidebook Wondrium doesn’t do anything and other times it works as designed. This is very frustrating when I am wondering if Wondrium is doing something in the background but nothing is indicated on the screen. Lastly, the website for this company does not recognize when I am signed in so I am unable to add items to my watch list. This is an essential feature and quite intolerable.

I have been a long-time supporter and student of The Great Course so I already know and trust your content. Please continue to improve the iOS app. Especially with features such as multi-tasking (iPAd Pro) so that I can watch a course and view the pdf lecture outline or take notes at the same time. Also, the user interface and download manager needs improvement. I would like to be able to organize my courses and have the ability to view other course materials (i.e., PDFs, etc.) within Wondrium . Lastly, the downloads take an incredibly long time (sometimes more than 30 minutes to download a 30 min lecture), even with the lower quality option selected. I trust you are already aware of most of these things and working on future updates. Thank you.

I’m a longtime Great Courses student (and supporter), and I’d love to heartily recommend Wondrium, but after taking it on a long car trip I was so frustrated I was tempted to sail it out the window. With a long ride, often in heavy traffic, all I needed was for Wondrium to continue playing the episodes in a course, and what I got was one or two episodes before it would stop and tell me that if I wanted to continue I had to subscribe. (Despite being signed in to an active account.) Then I had to exit Wondrium , restart Wondrium , and then find the course and episode all over again. (All while navigating an Interstate.) In addition, episodes would start in odd locations, again prompting a dangerous one handed juggling act. Good news? It’s not as bad as their one star Apple TV app. Bad news? A company with so many wonderful educational offerings can’t seem to get their tech act at all together. For $20/month, users deserve so much better.

First off, I want to say that I enjoy the content and love that the lecturers are knowledgeable and passionate about the subjects they teach.

However, I am about ready to delete Wondrium because of the difficulties with the interface. When I first open Wondrium , I have 0.5 seconds before my continue watching options disappear in favor of a large “banner ad” for a recommended course. The only way I get them back is by selecting another tab and then going back to the home tab.

The browse/search functions are also hard to navigate unless you know exactly what course you’re looking for. I would love to see more options to narrow down my searches.

Second, the last several times I’ve tried viewing a course, I have to back out and try again every 5-10 minutes because the audio glitches and no longer syncs with the video and subtitles.

Also there have been times where I have needed to stop in the middle of a lecture and when I go back to it, something glitches in the loading process and I have to start the lecture over.

For a $20/month subscription the least y’all could do is give us an app that works. I love the content but I’m almost ready to cancel my subscription because of the problems within Wondrium .

I love these courses and was thrilled when I realized I could keep learning new things with this subscription. I use it constantly.

But, Wondrium is far from intuitive. I keep checking to see if I’ve missed an update, but there have been no improvements in the 18 months or so that I’ve subscribed.

I can’t choose to download an entire course for audio, which I would love because I would listen in places that I now cannot due to lack of signal.

But the biggest problem is that EVERY TIME I open Wondrium I must search for the last thing I was listening to and play from there. In short, there is no “now playing” or “continue” option. I must go to my watch list, which is still not in order of my last watched, search through my many watched courses, touch it, then again on the play button.

Even if I’ve only closed it for a moment, there is no memory or easy way to continue. I do this many times a day. It’s a bit maddening.

This is fantastic content and I’m so glad it’s available to me at this price. But I admit that I hesitate to share it with others because of the lack of functionality.

Content is great, but it’s slow to stream. The first lecture I start streams fine but when it comes to streaming the next part of the lecture automatically, there’s often a 5-10 minute delay before it will start. Often times, when it doesn’t finally start, it will have skipped over 3 or 4 parts of the lecture. So, lecture 1 completes and lecture 5 starts streaming after 10 minutes of silence. I don’t see a particular reason for the slow transition, especially with full bars of LTE coverage. Anything else seems to stream fine; Apple Music, Pandora, 3 hour podcasts, but Great Courses Plus has issues and delays constantly. That would be my primary concern and a reason I may no continue. After all, the TED talks app is free, streams more readily and has similar, if not more expanded, content. I’m still in the air, but expect a more fluid experience for what I pay.

I love the Great Courses Plus. The caliber of teachers as well as the amazing content that is constantly coming out is fantastic. I think there are some things about Wondrium though that I wish would be easier to navigate. Mostly, I wish there was a way to select a course that I began watching and go to the course page instead of just going straight to a video. I like to see the next few lectures or just cherry pick what I will watch. Little things like that just make Wondrium a bit clumsy feeling and not quite intuitive as I would like. But the content itself more than makes up for it. I also love the audio option for when I’m in my car, it’s a fantastic option to have.

I LOVE the content of Wondrium. However, Wondrium has two glaring deficiencies. One, when you’re listening via Bluetooth and someone calls or you call someone, Wondrium DOES NOT PAUSE. Even if you pause BEFORE you answer, it will start playing AFTER you answer. Every time. When you’re driving, this is distracting at best and dangerous at worse. Two, and this is intermittent, but when you open Wondrium , sometimes the Continue Watching area does not show up on the Home Screen of Wondrium and the only way you can listen to your last episode is to either search for the series again or have it added to your Watchlist.

Other podcast apps don’t have these problems, so I’m assuming it would be an easy fix, yet these deficiencies still exist. Please fix these issues in an update soon!

Over the years I’ve learned far more from TGC than I ever learned in college (where, just to be clear, did well). I love audiobooks and podcasts, but I find I learn more from TGC. The information density is better for doing other things (like driving and cleaning), but unlike most podcasts or npr (bless its heart), you actually get depth and context and a sense of real understanding. Of course, it depends a lot on the professor and there’s a few duds, but there’s far more that are wonderful and the average is high. I really can’t praise TGC enough - I’ve spontaneously recommended it to countless people.
Meanwhile, Wondrium still needs work, but they seem to be aware of the issues and I’m pretty confident they’ll get it sorted out (if they haven’t already). If you find it a little annoying, don’t let that deter you - The Great Courses are an enormous treasure...one in which you can swim about like Scrooge McDuck, playfully spouting knowledge the way he did with gold coins.

The GCP is a powerful and effective tool that has provided my entire family members ranging from ages 6-80 with wealth of information from multiple fascinating lectures.
I have enjoyed many courses from History to Astrophysics to cooking and more. The lectures are engaging and easy to follow (English is my second language).
I appreciate the fact that I can log in from any device (10 in my account) and from anywhere in the wold! I can execute multiple daily tasks while learning. Getting stuck in traffic is no longer a waste of my life as long as I can listen to any of The Great Courses Plus lectures.
The only thing I wish can be improve, is the accessibility of the lessons in each Course. It takes too many steps of I want to start from the beginning or play a previously studied lesson. In any case, the fact that one can have access to such incredible amount of knowledge at his/her fingertips is powerful!

In the last few days I’ve watched lectures on quantum mechanics, the Higgs boson, the native peoples of North America, formal logic, education research, human personality, etc. They’ve ditched the old classical music and applause intro and the boring backdrops, and those aspects are now much more stimulating and aesthetically pleasant. TIP: go to settings and turn the use data button off and on again in pure IT Crowd fashion when you get the message about no data connection. Minor bug, no problem once you know the solution. My only other complaint is that you can’t rearrange the courses on your watchlist using Wondrium . While you can sign in to your account on, say, your laptop, and rearrange them from there, those changes don’t register on Wondrium . My app’s watchlist is still not in the order I’d like it be on. But overall, Wondrium is amazing, and as a longtime Teaching Company believer, I’m sure it will only get better and better.

I love the big learning library available through Wondrium. The topics range from ancient history, art, business, psychology, math, playing guitar and even religious studies. There's something for any mood. The downside with previous versions was that the content was video-only and if you locked your phone, it would close down the playback. With this latest version though they've added audio streaming , which works when the phone is locked. Now you can have a great lecture anywhere and I'm listening to a newly added lecture on Emotional Intelligence as I type this.

I think there are more improvements that can be made to Wondrium . e.g., better watched-synchronization between devices, but overall this is a great app that makes accessing the wealth of content a blast.