Get smarter without leaving home: Here's a free month of The Great Courses Plus

When's the last time you attended a class? If it's been a few years, you might appreciate The Great Courses, a sort of "Netflix for learning." The Great Courses offers a few hundred adult-level courses in categories as varied as economics, food and wine, science, literature, fine arts and travel. Every course has high video production quality, often with computer graphics and animations to help explain the lecture, delivered by an expert in the field. Usually, The Great Courses offers a 14-day trial before the subscription kicks in. But right now we've got an exclusive deal for Cheapskates readers. You can get a 30-day free trial to The Great Courses, but only if you use the button below (or, if you want to be pedantic, the link earlier in this sentence). If you go to the site any other way, you get the standard 14-day trial. 

If you like The Great Courses, you can let the clock run out on the trial, after which you'll be billed for whichever plan you chose when you signed up. You can opt to be billed $20 per month, or pay $30 once every three months. Yes, $20 per month is pretty pricey, but the quarterly billing plan is half that cost -- pretty reasonable, especially if you find yourself binging on education.

I honestly can't say enough good things about The Great Courses. It's not like watching a YouTube video of a college lecture; these are polished and highly informative, often accompanied by an (optional) PDF guidebook that's sort of like a textbook custom-made for the class you're watching. And the professors are credible public speakers with credentials in their subject matter. Randomly clicking around the science curriculum, for example, one of the first classes I ran across was an astronomy survey course taught by Neil deGrasse Tyson. And not everything is economics and rocket science; you can find classes on yoga, mindfulness, how to draw and a survey of the wines of California. 

You can watch The Great Courses in a browser, or using a Roku player, Apple TV or Amazon Fire TV.

If you're spending more time at home than you used to because of, you know, the global pandemic, there's probably never been a better time to give The Great Courses a shot. Watch some lectures for the simple joy of learning something new.