Cutting the Cord: The Great Courses' new streaming service

Mike Snider | USA TODAY

Tired of binge-watching? Try some binge learning.

Extended-learning company The Great Courses now lets you construct your own independent study syllabus and stream it at home and on the go.

The Chantilly, Va.-based company, which celebrates its 25th anniversary this year, has begun invitation-only testing of a subscription streaming video-on-demand service that includes 5,000 of its most popular lectures from its library of more than 14,000 lectures. Scheduled to go live this fall, The Great Courses Plus gives subscribers access to individual lectures from the educational firm's 7,000 hours-plus of content.

You can mix and match from a wide variety of courses about science, travel, history, photography, fine arts, music, religion and economics. The Culinary Institute of America, National Geographic and the Smithsonian Institution serve as partners on some of most popular courses available.

"It’s a different model and some of our current customers may be interested in it, but we see this as introducing an entirely different generation of customers to The Great Courses," said the firm's chief marketing officer Scott Ableman.

Traditionally, when a customer purchases a lesson plan from The Great Courses today, they get all of the lectures within a course. Shakespeare: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies has 36 individual lectures of about 30 minutes each — Julius Caesar: The Matter of Rome and Macbeth: Musing on Murder, for instance — and the course is sold as an audio download ($75.90), CD ($106.90), DVD ($151.90) and video download ($129.90). Once purchased, the course can be streamed, too.

Overall, the costs of The Great Courses range from as low as $16 to more than $500.

But subscribers to The Great Courses Plus ($49.95 monthly or $360 annually) get unlimited access to courses and can view individual lectures within each course at will.

"Now, you can dive into a half-hour lesson on the (Shakespearean era) Old Globe (Theatre), but then you may want to go to one of the other courses on the city of London or maybe learn how to cook something because you have a dinner party coming up and want to rediscover the lost art of cooking from the Culinary Institute of America," said chief brand officer Ed Leon. "We see this as the ultimate expression of the brand. You get thousands of lessons for one price."

Initially, The Great Courses Plus is available online and for Android devices in the Google Play store, with an iOS version for iPhones and iPads due soon. Just as The Great Courses will be adding more lectures to the service, so will it add more apps. Also in the works: apps for Apple TV, Amazon Kindle Fire, Roku and smart TVs from Samsung and Sony.

"This is for people who are naturally curious and interested in learning for the sake of learning without the pressure of schedules and homework and tests," Ableman said.

"Cutting the Cord" is a regular column covering Net TV and ways to get it. If you have suggestions or questions, contact Mike Snider via e-mail at msnider@usatoday.com. And follow him on Twitter: @MikeSnider.