Having done digital course materials from our earliest days by 1995 Tom Bruce and I had added a full on-line law course to the LII's product mix. In the years since, as we have continued, elaborated, and expanded our distance learning ventures, there have been countless proclamations that revolutionary, transforming, cataclysmic change was underway. Before long, higher education would be unrecognizable. Although we were prompted more by curiosity and conviction that revolutionary fervor, we kept waiting for the whoosh, the applause, the jostling company, the seers foretold. And so far, at least in the realm in which we operate, they haven't materialized. Incremental change ? yes; radical transformation ? no.

That discrepancy is the subject of these reflections. They have less to do with technology and learning than with the institutional factors that affect the pace and place of change in systems as complex as those that provide and control