In an attempt to try to restore popularity to the discipline of computer science here on campus after the crushing blow of the removal of the popular CS+X program, Stanford’s CS department has announced its plan to provide subtitles with every lecture recording with an added twist: these subtitles will be coded to the likeness of karaoke lyrics, so that any viewers can feel free to break into song as they watch along.
“Nobody goes to lectures,” said CS department chair John Mitchell. “That’s not an exaggeration. That’s fact. So we thought we might as well make things more interesting for the online following.” Mitchell then explained that upon activating the subtitles mode — “well, ‘activating’ is kind of a misleading word to use, since it is strictly not optional” — the lights would dim and a bouncy dot would begin to dance across lyrics on the screen, as the professor in the video would begin singing to the effect of a sixty-minute music video on, say, parallel virtual interfaces.
“Look, the candy thrown out during lectures simply wasn’t enough. It was breaking the department budget to buy four large bags of fun-sized Twix bars and Snickers so we decided to switch our focus,” CS lecturer Franklin Quilcrom commented. “Instead, now when students begin watching CS 221 lectures for the first time during week 7 of the quarter, they can playfully follow along to the sweet tunes of coding for loops and print lns needed for Markov decision processes and Big O’s.”
At press time, faculty were in the midst of heated debates on whether or not to transform certain professors into “YouTube Personalities”, subculture celebrities which would compete amongst each other for students’ attention and subscriber count, with the most popular receiving proportionate raises in their salary, status, and chances to have a devastating scandal or secret be uncovered.
