taken place, and it forces people to take extreme positions for and against.
By offering an alternative narrative, the aim of this chapter is to demonstrate that this revolution approach is not the only way to consider changes in higher education. The framework suggested here is that of resilience, but its function is illustrative, to demonstrate that alternative narratives and conceptualisations are possible. Resilience offers a tool for considering both the current context and areas that need addressing if an individual or an institution is to meet the challenges of open education. It is adapted from the notion of resilience in ecology, and I proposed it as a possible model at the end of The Digital Scholar (2011). This chapter extends that work, and, as well as the practical approach for considering the impact of any particular open education approach, the use of resilience to offer a narrative for considering changes to the education system as a whole is proposed.
Resilience
The concept of resilience has been applied in many domains, but has its roots in Holling’s (1973) study on the stability of ecological systems. The definition of resilience used was ‘a measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables.’ Resilience has found favour as a way of considering climate change. Hopkins (2009) defined it as ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganise while undergoing change, so as to retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.’ Walker et al. (2004) propose four aspects
