June 1, 2005

Barnes & Noble’s Portable Professor Series

For those of you who haven’t heard of the Teaching Company I encourage you to stop reading this and visit their site right now: www.teach12.com. For those of you who know of the Teaching Company’s greatness, you may not know of their major competitor Barnes & Noble’s Portable Professor Series. This series was actually originally recorded and published by Recorded Books and called “The Modern Scholar”, and they basically ripped off the concept of the Teaching Company which is not a bad model to rip off. They went around the United States and England and found distinguished college professors on the topics of history, philosophy, literature, and a handful of other college subjects. They then recorded the professors for 14 lectures providing us with an 8 hour course for a given topic on audio. At www.recordedbooks.com you can find all these courses on cassette and CD for $87.75 a course. I guess that price was a little too much, so Recorded Books decided to hand them over to Barnes & Noble to repackage them, rename them, and resell them on CD for $39.95 per course.

Now Barnes & Noble has 24 of these courses in their Audiobooks Section. They’ve spiced up the titles a little so what was labeled on Recorded Books as “Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts Fictions, and Lies in American History” is now called “Everything You’ve Been Taught Is Wrong” for Barnes & Noble’s Portable Professor Series. We have all their titles up on LearnOutLoud.com and you can browse them here:

www.learnoutloud.com/portableprofessor

They have audio samples and before you buy you might want to check out the Barnes & Noble course pages because they have quite a few reviews to help you decide. For example I was looking to buy “Altering the Blueprint: The Ethics of Genetics” but after reading three scathing reviews I decided against this. They just added four courses, but there’s still about twenty courses that Recorded Books has published that haven’t made the leap over to Barnes & Noble and are only available at www.recordedbooks.com for he $87.75 a piece.

Also now Audible.com has 7 of the Portable Professor courses available for digital download:

One God, Three Faiths
Benjamin Franklin
Six Months That Changed the World
To Rule Mankind and Make the World Obey
Shaping Justice
April 1865
Altering the Blueprint

This is surely the best deal if you’re an Audible member because you each course is one book credit, but for Non Audible subscribers they cost $27.97. There’s many reviews on Audible for these products and you can also download the course guide in pdf format for free. I bought “To Rule Mankind and Make the World Obey” with professor Frances Titchener from Utah State University. I would rate it as an average college course, but it was definitely entertaining and worth the price of tuition. I just started listening to “Benjamin Franklin” and it’s very informative and interesting.

I don’t necessarily think that the professors for these courses go through the rigorous evaluations and auditions that the Teaching Company puts their professors through. Nevertheless these courses seem like very accessible lecture courses that would cost you ten times the amount if you took them at a university. And with these you can listen to them on your own time in your car or anywhere now that they’re becoming available for digital download, and there’s no arbitrary multiple choice test at the end. It’s a great way to learn.