A professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln has reportedly been “absolutely destroyed” by YouTube’s autoplay feature after showing a video to her students.
Professor Janice Anderson was in the middle of showing her students an educational video on YouTube during an English class Thursday morning when the incident occurred.
According to those in the class, Anderson left the video to finish and had begun speaking to her students. At this point, YouTube’s autoplay feature had started playing another video.
A few students had looked around, wondering if they should warn Anderson of what was going on, or watch the scene play out.
“When I looked up at the screen and saw the timer countdown, I knew what was about to go down,” said Noman Palmer, one of the students in Anderson’s class. “We all did.”
While moving onto a different topic, the screen behind her started playing a completely different video, noticeably louder. Anderson turned around startled and asked what was going on.
When she received no response from the class, Anderson began confusedly clicking at the screen, trying to close out of the tab. In her frantic response, she accidently opened a new tab, leaving the video playing loudly.
“It was a disaster,” said Emily Woodson, another student. “She was working on closing the video for almost a minute. It was honestly embarrassing.”
Upon returning to the YouTube tab, Anderson pressed the spacebar in an attempt to pause the video, but instead made the page scroll down to the comments section while the video played on.
In a last-ditch effort, Anderson finally closed the internet browser, along with her PowerPoint presentation. The entire ordeal lasted almost a minute and a half.
“Why couldn’t she just pause the video?” said student Josh Green. “Or better yet, why not just turn the feature off?”