If you’ve ever tried to teach yourself something outside of school, you’ll know it’s pretty tricky. Obviously, new things are hard to learn. It’s also hard to have the discipline to stick with your new project. But the most difficult part of all often comes before you even embark on your learning adventure: deciding which materials to use.
Let’s say you’re curious about DNA. You took a biology class or two once upon a time, but it’s been a while. The only thing you really remember is that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. So where do you start?
Auditing a class can be expensive. Taking an online class on a platform like Udemy is much more reasonably priced, but like auditing a college class, you can be pretty sure the class will focus on topics besides genetics (like the foundations of biology). Maybe a book or two? A cursory Google search for “best genetics books for beginners” yields 152 million results. The first link by Goodreads has 44 books listed. Who’s to say they’re the right level for you, or are good quality, though?
We’re living in a time where we have unfettered access to all of humanity’s known information. We can ultimately learn anything we want at any time. But there’s just so much to sort through that finding exactly what you need feels impossible sometimes.
I don’t know the number of times I’ve given up on a project before I’ve even started, all because I was overwhelmed by the volume of resources and couldn’t decide where to start.
Thankfully, I found a service that cuts through the noise and delivers outstanding content that lets me jump straight into whatever it is I want to explore: The Great Courses on Audible.
The Great Courses (produced by The Teaching Company) are professionally recorded lectures by the best educators, professors, and industry experts from around the world. They produce lectures on every topic you can imagine, from particle physics to the history of Western Philosophy to the operas of Wagner.
The Great Courses are cool on their own (but expensive), and Audible is aight in its own right (but like with Goodreads, it’s still hard to know exactly which books are worth your time). Together, The Great Courses on Audible is pure dynamite.
There are several reasons why I love these courses so much:
1. The content is cheap and convenient to access.
Although The Great Courses charges several hundred dollars for many of their courses on their website, you can get them on Audible for just 1 credit ($15). Audible also lets you buy a book/course, and return it “no questions asked” if you decide you don’t like it. Additionally, Audible’s app is a dream to use. You can speed the audio up if it’s a little too slow-paced, and bookmark or make notes as you please.
2. The lecturers are fabulously entertaining to listen to.
I’ve found audiobooks to be hit or miss when it comes to narrators. Many narrators’ voices put me right to sleep. But listening to lectures is fundamentally different from listening to someone narrating a book. Book narrators and lecturers are ultimately using different languages. Book narrators are speaking the written language aloud, and lectures are created in real time, using everyday language. Our ears are more attuned to the style of spoken language than written language, and the natural inflection of spoken language used on-the-fly is easier to listen to and understand than written language that’s being recited or read aloud.
Additionally, the Great Courses makes it a point to only record the lectures of the best lecturers in the country. They do the vetting for you, and solve our earlier problem of not knowing how to “get through the noise and find the best material.”
3. I always learn a ton of new things (even on topics I think I know well).
I’ve found The Great Courses to be excellent resources for quelling your curiosity, whether you’re studying something familiar or totally new. I’ve yet to listen to something that assumes I have too much familiarity with a subject. They always build off of a high school-level foundation in a topic, and explain everything in a way that doesn’t make you feel like an idiot. And even lectures that cover topics I think I know well always provide some new perspective, real-world application, or detail that I hadn’t thought of before.
For example, Rosalind Franklin was discussed in both Biology: The Science of Life by The Great Courses and the popular book The Gene by Sidhartha Mukherjee. Dr. Franklin played a big part in the discovery of the molecular shape of DNA, so of course her story and contributions should be in every book about the history of genetics. But in Biology: The Science of Life, the lecturer Stephen Nowicki took a small detour to address an interesting question: “Without Rosalind Franklin’s crystallographies, Watson and Crick probably wouldn’t have been able to discover the molecular shape of DNA. So, why didn’t she receive the Nobel prize in conjunction with Watson and Crick?”
It was a really fascinating and sad story, and it’s also not a question I had thought to ask myself. There have been similarly interesting detours made in all of the Great Courses I’ve listened to so far. These detours are one of my favorite aspects of the courses by far.
4. The lecture notes have recommendations for further learning on the topic.
Every Great Course you buy on Amazon comes with a downloadable PDF that contains notes from each lectures, as well as citations and recommended resources for continuing to learn about the topic. The resources are an excellent complement the foundation that the course builds for you.
I find The Great Courses totally superior to traditional audiobooks, and an excellent place to start when learning about a topic I’m new to and curious about. It’s exhilarating to live in a time where we have access to so much information, and it’s especially exciting to have a tool that helps autodidacts make some quick sense of all that information.
If you’re an autodidact, do yourself a favor and check out The Great Courses on Audible!
PS: My favorites so far have been the previously mentioned Biology: The Science of Life by Stephen Nowicki and How to Listen to and Understand Opera by Robert Greenberg.