As noted, I have really been enjoying The Great Courses Plus. I finished a course of 48 or so lectures titled "History of the Ancient World" by Dr Gregory Aldrete and binged it over just a week or two. I've now started a bunch of other lectures in different topics but mainly history and philosophy.
Just curious what their reputation is with the historian community. They seem very academic and well researched and the professors appear to be respected researchers and professors. But i am curious if that is the view of historians in general.
Also, one of the things I liked about the ancient world course was the delve into various primary sources and info about how we know some of things we know. But I always have trouble finding good places to locate ancient primary sources for myself or overviews of artifacts and information about how we came to know what we know about the ancient world.
I'm looking for recommendations of perhaps some databases, websites, platforms, etc that have lots of primary sources, archeological information and stories or info about our discoveries of ancient ruins and how we came to theorize about the ancient world.
Also, any other platforms like The Great Courses that have great lectures or classes are welcome as well!
For online courses, I would recommend EdX, which has a large amount of free courses run by universities.
For ancient primary sources, I recommend Perseus (run by Tufts), which has texts and some art/archaeology materials as well. Penelope by UChicago also has primary and secondary texts online. There is a digital platform for Harvard's Loeb Classical Library series, although this requires a log-in (unless there is COVID access).
For looking into artifacts, I've found looking at museum websites is a useful and free way to do so. These sites often have basic information about the artifacts and sometimes bibliography for certain time periods or materials. I'd recommend the British Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Getty, but there are many more museums with large ancient collections you could look through.
So I also tend to binge Great Courses (I am able to get the audio versions for free from my library). This is what I'll say, specifically for the history courses:
The courses are meant to be the equivalent of undergraduate introductory courses. What that means is that even for the longer history courses, what you're mostly getting is a narrative structure of the subject, where the lecturer can at best discuss some of the sources being used, or some of the historiography on the subject. Which is great, but it's not the same as spending deep amounts of time analyzing primary sources, or having deep dives into academic schools covering specific periods of history and their differences.
The general audience (or paying audience, I should say) for Great Courses tend to be older, wealthier, whiter and a bit more conservative than your university population. I don't really think this impacts the quality of the lectures, but it does impact the subjects that get covered. There is a load on American, British and West European history or topics like Western civilization, philosophy or Christianity, and regions' history and culture tends to be lower in number and more at a survey level (there is an African history course that literally covers the period from Australopithecus to 2000). Ideologically it influences subject matter too, as there are a few courses on capitalism, but none on socialism (except for one that compares the two). Similarly you get a course on political conservatism but not really on other political movements (except one on Marxism from Marx to Lenin).
You don't really know the age of the courses until you start one. Some have literally been taped this year, and others are pushing 25 years or more. This is the case with Garry Hamburg's The Rise and Fall of Soviet Communism, which was recorded in the late 1990s, and it's not so much wrong (it's actually pretty good as far as addressing Soviet historiography to that date) as just not the most current source for learning the subject. I tend to think that there is almost something like a reverse 20 year rule - if you're learning a historic subject, you should really start with reading the most recent works from the past couple of decades to understand where the field is now, and only go back to older sources if you are trying to understand something important with the historiography (or - don't actually read Gibbon to learn about the later Roman Empire).
Lastly, some of the historians giving these courses are genuine big names in their fields, like Bart Ehrman on early Christianity. Others are extremely solid educators and lecturers at their universities (I have had the pleasure of actually having a few in person as teachers, shameless plug for Jennifer Paxton and her Medieval England courses). A few are solid in their fields, which they are lecturing on for Great Courses, but not as great when they stray out of their lane elsewhere: Patrick Allitt does a bunch of Great Courses on the British Empire, Conservatism, American Religion and the like, and he's fine, but he has also written works outside the Great Courses denying climate change, so don't assume anyone is infallible, especially if they are straying outside their lane (the actual Great Courses series on Climate Change is really solid, by the way).
So I guess I would put it this way - these are all basically the equivalent of undergraduate courses, and should be approached in a similar way: audit them. See if you like the topic and the lecturer's style, because if it's a drag (or if the material is really old) it's probably not worth your time. But overall the course material is not fringey or wrong, and they tend to be fairly solid, if introductory and weighted in choice of subject matter.