One of the actors and stakeholders in the battle between traditional institutions and the transformative potential of MOOCs, of course, are professors: the professional class of people whose role is to cultivate and train students to become researchers, teachers, and citizens. In his blog for the Huffington Post, John T. Delaney attempts to do just that, kind of. Rather than give voice to those experts that seem to be sidelined in the race to populate the world of higher education with MOOCs, he essentially scolds those who are not getting behind the eight ball, and warns administration to work more nimbly with the recalcitrance of "entrenched interests."
The key actors in the network are all present already in the first two paragraphs: higher education, administration, observers (code for advocates for the revolutionary power of MOOCs etc.), faculty, unions ("entrenched interests"), students, and of course technology, the growth of which is inevitable.
Delaney presents the multi-barbed technological hook in a triumvirate: less prestigious schools will adopt new technologies more readily than well-established universities, effectively shifting the balance of power; the belief that students will continue to pay a premium for the brand will only add to the lag time to adopt and implement new technological forms of delivery; and faculty governance, together with union structures will slow any urgent moves to change to compete in the new technological/educational marketplace.
What is left unquestioned in Delaney's blog is the naturalized agency of each of the actors in the network, and in particular: faculty governance with unions, technology, and students. These are the intractable actors that administration (the good guy here in need of coaching) must creatively adapt to. Telling is the approach to the final paragraph, where a new actor appears: the reader.
The readers have the ears of Delaney's deliberative discourse here. His aim is political, and preparatory. There are battles to come that are bigger than what is at stake with adoption of technological modes of course delivery. These battles are hidden from view, and Delaney postures himself as having the rhetorical savvy to read the symptoms and to guess at what the symptoms point to.