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Adds lecture slides to Netflix
By Chandler Walter, Humour Editor
Douglas College philosophy professor James Moran was discouraged when class after class that he taught would come to school without having done the assigned readings, and he decided to do something about it.
Moran managed to sneak his lecture slides onto his students Netflix accounts without them being any the wiser.
“Well, it was obvious what these kids were up to,” said Moran during an interview. “I get it, you get home after class, you’re not going to look at the study material, you’re going to binge a half-dozen hours of How I Met Your Mother or Gilmore Girls. But I figured I could use this to my advantage.”
Moran had grown tired of the lack of participation in his class, mostly due to the fact that he had banked on at least an hour of in-class discussion among students per day.
“Honestly, do you know how long it takes to put a full day’s worth of lecture together? And with the new House of Cards season out, I just don’t have that kind of time.”
Luckily enough, Moran is something of a tech wiz as well as a philosopher, and once he got the email addresses of his students, it was game over for them.
“It was simply a matter of reverse engineering the algorithm of the flux capacity system automatons of each Netflix account,” Moran said, “or in simpler terms, I hacked ’em.”
Now, after each episode, a student has to sit through five minutes of slides before moving on to the next one.
“I hate it,” said student Jena Lane. “If I get home at five from school, that means I only have about eight hours of Netflix before bed. On a good day I can get through at least a season of Parks and Recreation or something, but these damn philosophy commercials are seriously impeding all my hard work.”
No matter how the students feel about this forced learning, Moran said that is is doing wonders for the in-class discussions.
“Now I just sit back and let them have it out about the latest moral dilemma, or whichever paradox I snuck into their rerun,” said Moran. “It’s great. I get one side of the class in a heated argument with the other, and pretty soon they’re engaging in well thought out philosophical discussions on their own. Meanwhile, I’ve got Kevin Spacey on the tablet I keep behind my podium.”
