Budapest (HR), April 2013 - The European Journal of Open, Distance and eLearning (EURODL) presents scholarly work and solid information about open leaning, distance learning, and eLearning. Since 1995 it has provided a home for the introduction of new dimensions of technology-enhanced learning and has made a meaningful contribution to the open content movement. In the most recent edition, Martin Weller from the Institute of Educational Technology, The Open University (UK) and Terry Anderson of the Centre for Distance Education, Athabasca University, Canada, published an absorbing article entitled “Digital Resilience in Higher Education”.

Higher education institutions face a number of opportunities and challenges as the result of the digital revolution. The institutions perform a number of scholarly functions that can be affected by new technologies - the desire is to retain these functions where appropriate, whilst the form they take may change. Much of the reaction to technological change comes from those with a vested interest in either wholesale change or maintaining the status quo.

Taking the resilience metaphor from ecology, the authors propose a framework for analysing an institution’s ability to adapt to digital challenges. This framework is examined at two institutions (the UK Open University and Canada’s Athabasca University) using two current digital challenges, namely Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and Open Access publishing.