Muffins, MOOCs, and the genetic diversity of the classroom

On Sunday afternoon, I decided to make muffins to eat the next day, and, having no muffin recipe on hand, I fed a request into Google. As usual, pages and pages of results came up: recipes from venerable recipe factories like Betty Crocker or Food Network, special-ingredient muffin varieties suggested by special-ingredient vendors, and many blog posts lovingly and obnoxiously illustrated by one photograph after another. Google is now clever enough to extract the user rating for some of the recipes on the bigger sites. Even this additional hint, however, doesn’t offer the befuddled Sunday afternoon muffin-maker much in the way of guidance. Should one trust the 3 1/2-star recipe with 500 votes or the 4 1/2 star recipe with 12 votes?

In the eyes of the economist or the technologist, this catastrophe of choice might look like an inefficiency. Shouldn’t there be one best muffin recipe, culled out from the competing inferiors by the wisdom of democratic choice? And in a world of frictionless information flow, shouldn’t everyone flock to that best muffin recipe, and allow the second- and third-rate recipes to sink into deserved obscurity?

Yet there is no consensus on the One True Recipe, and so the amateur baker has no choice other than to finally select at whim. I made mine following a blogger’s recipe, and they came out fine. Could I have found a better recipe? Perhaps. But the one I found was certainly satisfactory.

Baffling as it may be, this recipe anarchy is a good thing, for it allows for what I like to think of as a genetic diversity of ideas. The barriers to entry for baking experimentation are quite low, and so the homemaker with a few extra hours and a WordPress account can offer up his own suggestion for just how many teaspoons of baking soda go into the perfect muffins. Some of these—effectively, the ones that end up in the first two pages of Google’s search results—will be read and copied far more often than others. But the chance remains that some renegade inventor will concoct some new enticing recipe, and it will burst from obscurity to liven up the range of available options.

The underlying insight here is that there is no One True Recipe for muffins, but a lot of different good ones which are suitable for different tastes, and, importantly, which are all based off of each other. It is a lesson which we should keep in mind when imagining the future of education. One of the leading arguments for the digitization and broadcast of course content throughout the world, either free or for a price, is that the very best teachers ought to be teaching everyone, not just the students who are rich or lucky enough to be enrolled at the university which happens to employ them. Why should Ball State hire some unknown to teach introductory economics when they could just show their students a live video of Greg Mankiw doing it at Harvard? Why should only the students at UW-Madison have the privilege of learning American environmental history from Bill Cronon, the doyen of the field and a riveting lecturer, when those same lectures could grace the ears of every sophomore history student in the nation?

The argument is that teachers should be more like actors or musicians, who work in industries where the marginal cost of reproduction is already close to zero. If you want to hear the new Taylor Swift song, you can buy the album and hear Taylor Swift—who is assuredly the best singer of Taylor Swift songs—singing it herself. There’s no reason to get your local singer to give her best impression of it. You don’t have to settle for what’s nearby; you can demand the very best in the world. That’s why there are a few musicians who make millions of dollars and then a lot of other who make almost nothing. Leave aside, for a moment, whether the stars truly represent “the best.” At the very least, they represent the item in greatest demand. And, from a purely economic standpoint, what is in the greatest demand is the thing which should be available most widely.

So why shouldn’t there just be one course in introductory economics, or American environmental history, or whatever, taught by the very best faculty member in the country at the top of his or her game, and broadcast liberally to any student who can sit down in front of a screen and watch? One reason is because the “genetic diversity” which is so robust in the muffin-recipe world is worth preserving in the world of course syllabi, too. Baked goods and even music production have fairly low barriers to entry. So even if these fields become dominated by a few stars, it’s safe to say that there will still be many innovators laboring in their spare time, hoping to prove that it is in fact they who are the best, the most desirable. Running undergraduate courses, on the other hand, is time-intensive, tricky, and not exactly conducive to home tinkering. It’s not something you’re likely to mess around with in your kitchen. Not only are the production-side barriers high; the consumption-side barriers are formidable, too. You can try out an obscure muffin recipe at the risk of only a few dollars of ingredients and an hour’s time. Who, on the other hand, wants to be the first student to “try out” some nameless professor’s new, unproven course, when they could alternatively be spending their precious credit-hours in a well-pedigreed course taught by an internationally-recognized expert? So it seems likely that, if education tilts towards the winner-does-all model, the number of distinct course offerings on a given topic will shrink dramatically.

This is a problem, because all of the tinkerings, trials, and tests which take place in the thousands of syllabi written each year collectively form one of the most important ways in which new knowledge—both topical and pedagogical—is produced. Faculty borrow from each others’ teaching techniques and content material, and little by little the joint project of both teachers and students gets better over time. This means, of course, that not everyone gets to take courses with the “best” professor. But it also means that, as a collective unit, the higher education system provides a structure in which new ideas can be developed, proved, and improved.

This “genetic diversity” of educational experience is part of what has made American higher education so robust. Its opposite—a monocrop world in which only a few “best” breeds are selected and reproduced en masse—is dangerous both intellectually, politically, and pragmatically. We ought to be careful, then, that in the drive towards technological efficiency, we don’t wipe out the pedagogical diversity which is the engine of progress.