Hillsdale College’s marketing department has released a new DVD set of the college’s online Constitution 101 class.
The class, which is the most popular of Hillsdale’s online courses with more than 800,000 viewers since 2012, is something Hillsdale has wanted to release since the Constitution course was re-filmed in 2014, Senior Manager of Direct Response Marketing Jonathan Lewis said. Although the course is online for free, those interested can get the DVDs for a gift to the college of $100 or more, according to an ad for the limited-edition set.
“A lot of our people have asked for it for quite a while,” Lewis said. “People who say ‘I like the online courses, but I want to be able to watch it on my TV or show it to someone else,’ or some people have people over and do it as a group.”
The set was first made available at the American West Center for Constructive Alternatives seminar and in a marketing email a few weeks ago. The set is also advertised in a banner ad on the main course catalog page for Hillsdale’s online classes, which markets it “as part of a homeschool curriculum or for small group discussions.”
“It’s similar to the Constitution Reader, where if someone takes the course and makes a donation, we’ll send them a reader as a ‘thank you’ for that gift,” Lewis said. “So it’s a similar thing, where if they send us a $100 gift as a response to this email, then they’ll get a DVD set.”
Lewis said the college wanted to make the new DVDs more of a luxury item than the bare-bones edition released in 2012.
“We had a set a while ago that was pretty basic, from the 2012 shoot, but we couldn’t really use that anymore, because it was different professors, different content,” he said. “We wanted it to be something where you could put it on your shelf and be proud of this collection.”
The design of the three-disc box set, like many special-edition DVDs, resembles a book, with a Hillsdale logo embossed on the front.
The college also is looking into more DVD versions of its online courses, after getting plenty of orders, Lewis said.
“We were going to kind of see how this one went, but it went very well,” Lewis said. “So we’ll probably wait a bit, ask them and say, ‘Did you enjoy it? Was it a good experience?’ And see what course they’d like to see next on DVD.”