Dive Brief:
- Jet Blue and Virgin America airlines now offer video college lectures during flights.
- The airlines plan to update the lectures with new selections about every month, according to Money magazine.
- Jet Blue’s lectures are from MOOC provider Coursera, while Virgin America offers selections from the Great Courses series.
Dive Insight:
The captive audience on long flights seems to offer a great marketing opportunity for online course providers and partner institutions. Will “How to Code in One Hour” courses be far behind? Jet Blue, which started offering the lecture videos in December, offers a lineup that includes professors from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, and Berklee School of Music. The airline also has how-to videos from Rouxbe. Virgin America started offering recorded lectures this month, including selections from Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium, and David Christian, history professor at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.