What if you build it and they don't come?

Apparently, the correct quote from Field of Dreams is 

If you build it, he will come.

I haven't seen the film. Nor do I completely understand the context. 

I work for a software company. We build software to make education better. Or at least that's the idea. I am back in school once more. It is a bit strange to be back in a classroom now. There are people there who are like 10 years younger than me. Its a bit weird listening to their conversations. Some things don't change. Video games are still the norm for the overweight young adult male. Except it is something called Call of Duty or some such thing.

The platform used by the school I am attending is a rival platform to the one my employer builds and sells. We lost this contract a while back. This gives me a good opportunity to get to know this competing system and learn from it. Except... I don't see much use of it in there. The guy teaching my class has the simplest of things for the course. He has like 6 links in his course page so far. All of them link to either a docx file or a pptx file. And that's it. Oh and he uses the mail in there. But he admits that it is very limited.

Which begs the following questions: 

• Are we wasting our time building all these features?
• Is he unaware of the potential of the platform?
• Have I consumed too much of the corporate kool-aid and become a believer in technology for education to the point where common sense takes a departure... and I believe learning should involve use of e-learning platforms?

I don't know. I am not sure whether I was shocked at the simplicity of the course material or saddened by it. Hell, I can monkey this together in a few minutes on any site. A couple of <a href's> and some <li's> and what not and we're good. Is this why we spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, hours of testing, crap and what not for? So that the instructor can link to a few word documents and power point presentations? Is this why they are not our customer? I don't know.

Recently (well, last summer; time sure flies), I had a conversation with a former co-worker. He's an awesome guy, taught me a lot of things. He wrote a couple of things on a piece of paper that I still hold onto to this day. Anyway, he's now a high school teacher. He teaches sciences and chemistry to those that can tell the difference between science as a subject and chemistry as discipline. I asked him about how they use technology to teach kids. His answer was along  the same lines as the way I see my course material today. They use google sites. Or to be more precise, the kids used to mock up little sites on google sites and then link off to content and things. The teachers caught on fairly quick and decided to create pages for themselves. 

There isn't anything super-fancy there. No fancy question pools or agents that can do things. Just storing the content in some place that is accessible to the student and the teacher. Technology that works and does the job. Without the fluff. That's a pretty novel idea I think. 

I realise that this isn't how administrators or people in charge of education think (the various provosts and deans and what not at universities), but the more I think about it, the more I wonder what role we have in shaping education. These people don't see a need for it. Or at least, not enough to invest time in creating fancy course materials. Is it because it is too clunky to use? Too many clicks? Too much proprietary stuff that is not portable? 

What is the point of all the work I do if a professor who teaches technology chooses not to use the significant feature set that is available to him? The product is not one I work on, but the idea is the same. What good is a product we spend hours to build if no one out there is using it? Or maybe they are... and I am spending too much time thinking about stuff rather than sleeping. 

Oh well. Off to sleep. Thoughts? Well, say something then.