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182 The score of 29 indicates that MOOCs represent a challenge to the OU, but one which it is developing resilient practices to meet.

Walker and Salt (2006) apply resilience thinking to economic scenarios as well as ecological ones, for instance, as a model to consider the changing fortunes of a construction company or the nature of a town over time. Key to their model is the adaptive cycle, which Gunderson and Holling (2002) observed in ecological systems. This has four main phases: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganization, as illustrated in Figure 10.

Rapid growth is the initial expansion (of a business or a population), conservation is when it maintains a steady state, release is a period of ‘creative destruction’, when it enters a new phase, and reorganisation is when it ­re-establishes itself in a new state.

For Walker and Salt, a system can have many different ­stable states, separated by thresholds. When a system crosses a threshold,