I also have a yearly training budget at work that I've never gotten around to using. If you had a yearly training budget what would you use it for?
"The Teaching Company" has rebranded to "The Great Courses" and they produce uniformly great product. Your local public library probably has shelves of their physical products under both names, probably. Mine has more than one bookcase of audiobooks and also the dvd form of some lectures. How you interpret "fair use" once you get your mitts on physical media is your own dilemma. Somehow I got on their mailing list and all I can say is never pay retail, because just like a department store, in a rotation pattern, 25% of the store is on sale for 90% off at any given time. I'm told their products are available to Audible subscribers, but not being an audible subscriber I don't know. I have probably listened to dozens of their courses over the last few decades and never been disappointed.
There are a surprising number of courses only available officially on itunes. Bulliet's "History of Iran" from Columbia U is beyond excellent, I listened to it a couple years ago and I don't remember how I "cracked it" such that my android podcast player had access, I remember it was a huge PITA but worth the effort.
Must be nice to have a training budget. Those disappeared from all my F500 sized megacorp employers in the 90s. Back when we had them, they were awesome. Right around the time those budgets disappeared, we mostly bought subscriptions to the new "Safari" service which was very interesting reading.
I may not agree with everything but it’s a nice refresher and it’s certainly the kind of course that more people should take; not enough people know enough about the food they put in their mouths.
[1] https://www.edx.org/course/mcgillx/mcgillx-chem181x-food-tho...
If someone would rip the videos off Coursera, strip out the unneeded video, concatenate, and upload to archive.org it could work out pretty well.
However, the presentations vary in terms of pure entertainment. This hasn't mattered to me because I select courses by content. Cat videos I can get anywhere.
