Which Platform, or Wrong Question!

Can the choice of elearning technology give you a strategic advantage in higher education? To focus on platform selection without a major change in organisational culture and structure may be missing the crux of what is happening in our industry. We are moving to technology time, where change does not happen all at once and then stop, it gets faster and faster. There is no perfect and correct end-point to discover when you are on technology time. Platforms will come and go. Wherever you get to you will have to leave very quickly. A static organisation that  bets on the right platform and then languishes will be overtaken very quickly. A dynamic organisation will keep pace with a well articulated vision that does not include technology choices.
Technology is raining down, and most institutions are struggling to keep up. A more important strategic advantage might be a vision combined with the ability to keep pace. Do you have the structure and culture and strategy to avoid being left behind? Are your eLearning units on the same page, under the same management, working to a well articulated vision? Are they using well established change management techniques to deal with this once in a lifetime transformation? For the things they don’t know is there a structured program of experiments that  gives some hope of finding them out?

Thoughts?
Simon Collyer