The notion is widespread that higher education, and maybe all education, is about to be transformed by technology. This hope or fear (depending on where you sit) is fed by the breakneck pace at which new technologies burst upon the scene. Enterprises like Google and Facebook are among the poster children for this observation, and who can fail to be astounded by the way first the iPhone and then seemingly ten minutes later the iPad transformed first the cell phone and then the portable computing industries. Perhaps most important, these devices have quickly transformed the way many of us communicate, read, and organize many aspects of our lives.

Technology and technical change certainly have great potential for changing education. The way students study today is dramatically different from the way they studied even a decade ago. But questions about the pace and character of change require some perspective.

Let’s take the iPad as an example. Some of the older users of the iPad may recall an earlier device from Apple called the Newton. This was a tablet computer, introduced in 1993, which relied on handwriting recognition for data input. And the recognition software was pitifully, hilariously bad—bad enough that Doonesbury dined out on jokes about it for months. The product was an instant and humiliating failure for Steve Jobs, reportedly a somewhat thin-skinned fellow. In that moment of humiliation was born in Jobs a relentless determination to design a tablet computer that really worked. And so, 17 years later, out popped the iPad. The iPhone was at least as much a byproduct of development work on the tablet computer as the other way around.

What made the iPad a decades-in-development instant success? A computer is a very complicated device made up of a great many precisely designed parts. To make it lightweight, durable, capable, and beautiful requires many designers and engineers to innovate across a number of specialized elements. So called “gorilla glass”—strong, light, and scratchproof—is just one example. Tiny, capacious, reliable data storage devices are another. Making it all work together is a big project of its own.

Software innovation, the founding core competence of companies like Google and Facebook, is just one element in the creation of an innovative hardware product like the iPad.

We would submit that a successful school or college is more like a complicated hardware device than it is like an ingenious search engine. It requires coordinating the efforts of people with a great many different competences and specializations. A good school or college engages its students in a variety of intellectual and human experiences that, coordinated properly, add up to more than the sum of their parts.

There is nothing here to say that schools and colleges cannot be improved by new technologies. But creating new technologies is a much more straightforward task than transforming the educational processes to which those technologies contribute. And the classroom (whether physical or virtual) processes and the individual courses they compose can’t quickly and simply be put together into new educational institutions and experiences. Attempting to transform them overnight is more likely to yield an Apple Newton than a nice new iPad.

A fascinating article in the New England Journal of Medicine that reviews the decades-long process through which American industries incorporated IT successfully into their operations bolsters our claim that successful introduction of new technologies into an industry takes time. It turns out that making information technology pay off in the medical arena has not been simple at all. The authors draw on ample evidence from other industries to propose three lessons for health-care providers, that could well apply to education: “invest in creating new measures of productivity that can reveal the quality and cost gains that arise from … IT, avoid impatience or overly optimistic expectations about return on investment and focus on the delivery reengineering needed to create a productivity payoff, and pay greater attention to measuring and improving IT usability.” The author’s overall conclusion is well worth the attention of educational leaders: “[avoid] broad claims about overall value that are based on limited evidence.”