Category Archives: Beatles College Courses

Alert: Free Online Beatles Course

While perusing Facebook this morning, I saw an ad for Great Courses Plus offering a free online course about The Beatles. I decided to save all my readers the hassle of clicking on a Facebook ad (that only encourages more unwanted ads) and look into it myself.

The course is called England, the 1960s, and the Triumph of the Beatles and includes 12 lectures. Each lecture is about 25 minutes:

  1. The Magical Mystery of the Beatles
  2. Fateful Intersections in Liverpool

  3. Finding the Beat in the Beatles

  4. Nowhere Men: The Dark Side of the Beatles

  5. Beatles for Sale: Brian Epstein’s Genius

  6. The Cold War, JFK, and the Beatles

  7. The Beatles Conquer America

  8. The Englishness of A Hard Day’s Night

  9. Help! The Beatles at the Top in 1965

  10. Crossroads: The Beatles in 1966

  11. The Summer of Sgt. Pepper’s

  12. Hello, Goodbye: The End of the 1960s

From what I can make out from the website, once you’re registered and give them your credit card information, your 14 Day FREE Trail will begin. But here’s the fine print on the site with how to avoid having to pay for anything:

If you cancel, service access will terminate at the end of the current paid billing period. If you cancel during the free trial, access will remain until the end of the free trial period.
There is no refund for early termination.

I’m not sure how long this course has been offered, but the 26 reviews of it only go back one month, so it appears fairly new. It also appears to be the online Beatles related course on this site.

I feel the need to note that this is not an affiliate article. I get nothing for mentioning this course to you and am only doing to bring attention to something of interest to Beatles fans. So if you need something to do while staying home during the pandemic, you may want to check this out. I know I will be signing up…and then canceling the next day while still enjoying my 14 day free trail!

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FREE Beatles college course & Upcoming Beatles Symposium

So…you think you know the Beatles? Or, you want to learn more about the Beatles? Well, there is an online course called, “The Music of The Beatles” and it’s FREE! The course is offered through the website Coursera where you can take all types of free college courses. In fact, I encourage you to do a search on any topic in their search engine! The Music of The Beatles is offered on the site by the University of Rochester and the instructor is Dr. John Covach. It’s a seven week course, but if you can spare 2 hours a day, you can actually get through an entire week in just one day. I’ll be finishing up this course as you’re reading this on Sunday morning when I publish it. In the meantime, head on over to the site and check it out. If you’d like more than just a warm fuzzy feeling for finishing the course, you can pay the $49 to get a certificate for having completed it..but you’ll have to download and print it out at home.

John Covach University of Rochester Beatles Symposium

Professor John Covach

Speaking of John Covach, he’s also the Program Chair for the upcoming Beatles symposium to be held September 27-29, 2019 at the University of Rochester. This three day event is titled, Come Together: Fifty Years of Abbey Road, and obviously will have presentations, interviews, etc. based on the Beatles’ album Abbey Road that was released in 1969. According to the website, the featured speakers include John Kurlander (engineer on Abbey Road), Andy BabiukWalter Everett, and Kenneth Womack …just to name a few. Currently, the symposium is still in the Call For Papers stage of being set up, so there are not many details on the website, but I would advice you keep up to date on it and check back often: Come Together: Fifty Years of Abbey Road

In the meantime, why not pick up a copy of Covach’s book, What’s That Sound?: An Introductory to Rock and It’s History

 

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Filed under beatles, Beatles College Courses, Beatles Symposium, Rock and roll