The Teaching Company
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The Teaching Company is a Chantilly, Virginia company that produces recordings of lectures by nationally top-ranked university professors. The professors create courses for the company in a special studio located outside of Washington DC; they are then offered for sale in audiotape, CD, DVD, MPEG-4, and MP3 formats.
The company was founded in 1990 by Thomas M. Rollins, former Chief Counsel of the United States Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources and a graduate of Harvard Law School, who noticed the effectiveness of videotapes in learning during his study. He initially tried to create a government program to produce tapes for the public, but due to Constitutional constraints was not able to. After leaving office the idea stayed with him and he started seeking out top professors to create courses for sale to the public.
As of 2007 the company offers more than 260 courses, which span more than 3,000 hours of content across nine subject categories: Business and Economics, Fine Arts and Music, Ancient and Medieval History, Modern History, Literature and English Language, Philosophy and Intellectual History, Religion, Science and Mathematics, and Social Sciences.
Course offerings are targeted to adult education and life-learners, typical of what would be seen in a University or College undergraduate program for non-majors; there is also a series for high school students. Courses include supplemental booklets with outlines of the individual lectures, recommended reading lists, general bibliographies, and questions to consider. Full printed transcripts are also available.
Courses are available in as many as 5 formats. Originally, you could get any course in audio cassette or VHS tape. CD and DVD versions followed soon thereafter. Many courses are now also available in direct download via mp3 format, which comes at a reduced cost due to the lack of packaging and shipping.
Every course goes on sale at least once per year. These sales encompass an entire discipline or academic area.
They will occasionally put a free mp3 download of a one or two part lecture on their website; recent offerings have been the "The DaVinci Code" and "Duke Ellington - The Jazzman."
On October 2, 2006, the company was acquired by Brentwood Associates, a private equity investment firm.[1]
Partial list of instructors
[edit] Footnotes
[edit] References
- Kate Bales. "Ivy League Courses for Price of a Video", International Herald Tribune, February 16, 1994.
- Linda Mathews. "Adult Education; No Tests and You Can Hit Rewind", New York Times, March 31, 1996.
- Kendra Nordin. "From the college lecture hall to your headphones", Christian Science Monitor, January 28, 2003.
