In the years since Bill Massy and I published Thwarted Intervention, I have come to better understand higher education’s tepid embrace of the new learning technologies. My “aha” moment occurred at the San Diego meeting of the Spellings Commission in February 2006. Before us were three technology experts. Each had come to plead for more money to support the development of open-source educational software. More exasperated than usual, I mused during the comment period that what the technologists needed was not more money, but more customers. The genesis of my observation was the finding in Thwarted Innovation that there was no demand for e-learning software, particularly on the part of faculty, and hence no market.
It turned out that the most senior of our witnesses was even more exasperated. He was not interested in hearing that customer demand might be required to spur e-learning’s development. Looking me in the eye he said, “You don’t understand. If we build it they will come.” For nearly 20 years I had used that line from the 1989 film Field of Dreams to parody the assumption by educational researchers that what intrigues them will be of interest to those whose lives they are trying to change. I called it the Kevin Costner theorem of strategic change, after the star of the film about an Iowa farmer who hears a mysterious voice telling him to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Suddenly it was not parody but fact — the deeply held conviction that the new technologies in themselves would drive educational reform. Faculty would change how they taught because they could not resist the beguiling power of the new technologies.
Sometimes the spread of an innovation does follow the “if we build it” scenario. It’s not clear, for example, that there was a huge demand for a new kind of MP3 player prior to Apple’s introduction of the iPod. But that device proved beguiling enough to spawn whole new forms of communication including, but not limited to, podcasts. What was clear to me that afternoon in San Diego, however, was that e-learning was no iPod. It was not an innovation that would drive change but rather would prove to be one that could spread only in response to someone else’s demand for change. In short, what the technologists needed was not more grant money but more faculty customers who were willing and able to invest their own time and their institution’s funds in a set of innovations that solved their problems rather than satisfying the technologists’ inquisitiveness.
