• Rajiv stands in the courtyard of the Brock University campus, with a tower and other buildings the background. Rajiv is wearing a shirt and lanyard, both with the university logo.
    Academia - Leadership

    Reflecting on my first six months at Brock

    February 1, 2023 - By 

    The six months since I began serving as Brock University’s Vice Provost, Teaching and Learning has been an immensely meaningful and rewarding journey and I want to mark this milestone by sharing a few reflections… The choice to take the opportunity at Brock was a family decision and one born out of work with a wonderful coach, Isabel Budke, who helped me to achieve greater clarity about my personal and professional goals. One reason this wasn’t a quick decision is that I absolutely loved my work and adored my colleagues at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, where I first began working in…

  • Academia

    Lessons from the Pandemic Journey (Part 2)

    September 26, 2021 - By 

    Last week, I gave a virtual keynote at the 2021 OLC Accelerate Conference. The title of my talk was 20/21: A Pedagogical Journey. In it I reflected on the journey of higher education over the past 18 months, including the many lessons learned and some of the lessons that have gone begging. In Part 1 of this series of posts I shared two of these insights, about the critical role that Centres for Teaching & Learning played during the pandemic and how we mustn’t forget the lessons of the past 18 months as we rebuild the future of higher education. In this…

  • Academia

    Lessons from the Pandemic Journey (Part 1)

    September 21, 2021 - By 

    Yesterday, I gave a virtual keynote at the 2021 OLC Accelerate Conference. The title of my talk was 20/21: A Pedagogical Journey. In it I reflected on the journey of higher education over the past 18 months, including the many lessons learned and some of the lessons that have gone begging. In this post I share two of those insights… Looking Back: Centres for Teaching and Learning as First Responders As the pandemic hit our shores, our team in the Teaching & Learning Commons felt a deep sense of purpose and mission. We knew that our faculty were overwhelmed and anxious about…

  • Academia - Leadership

    Reflections on leadership, self-care, and building humane systems

    August 15, 2021 - By 

    Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare Audre Lorde Three weeks ago my family and I spent three days on the gorgeous Southern Gulf Islands. Even a few hours into the trip I began to experience a palpable unpeeling of tension, a distancing from tasks, a delayering of noise and news, and a recentering of spirit and self-care. It brought into relief just how much cognitive and task overload I have regretfully become accustomed to and how much I have been risking burnout. This is something I haven’t paid sufficient attention…

  • Academia - Pedagogy

    Pivots, Pirouettes, and Piqués: Gracefully Managing the Anxieties of Remote Teaching and Learning

    April 17, 2020 - By 

    Reblogged from the KPU Teaching & Learning Commons blog. As we should all know by now, pivoting rapidly to remote delivery of teaching and learning over the course of a few days to is not the same thing as designing an effective online course. However, as many of you will also now experience, designing an online course with a few weeks notice (perhaps also while you are pivoting for your Spring semester’s final weeks and final assessments) is not quite the same thing as having four months to plan for teaching online in the Fall. Before you read any further,…

  • Academia - OER

    OER, Equity, and Implicit Creative Redlining

    April 6, 2018 - By 

    The open education movement wants to be a force for equity. The argument is straightforward and powerful: Widen access to educational resources and those who disproportionately suffer at the hands of the exploitative business models of commercial publishers will disproportionately benefit, in both economic and educational terms. As someone who has personally benefited from generous and life-changing sponsorship of access to a high quality education, this argument is not simply theoretical for me. It is my lived experience. This is why I will never stop pushing for nor understate the importance of widening access to education. But if the open…

  • Academia

    #ScholarSunday

    February 11, 2018 - By 

    One of my resolutions for 2018 is to participate regularly in #ScholarSunday (a wonderful initiative conceived by @raulpacheco). Because representation matters, I am choosing to highlight the work of a woman or PoC each week for the next 50 Sundays. — Rajiv Jhangiani (@thatpsychprof) January 7, 2018 If you work in #HigherEd and are organizing a conference/panel this year hopefully you have realized that “manels” and all-male keynotes are unacceptable. “No qualified woman” or “no PoC applied” are lazy excuses and/or willfully bind to systemic barriers. Please do better. — Rajiv Jhangiani (@thatpsychprof) January 7, 2018 Feel free to consider…

  • Academia - OER - Publishers

    Just how inclusive are “inclusive access” e-textbook programs?

    June 29, 2017 - By 

    As is now well documented and understood, unrelenting increases in the prices of university textbooks (typically between 3 and 4 times the rate of inflation) have not been matched by increases in student spending. Whereas the U.S. College Board and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada respectively advise students to budget US$1300 and CA$1000 per year for textbooks and other course materials, data collected by the National Association of College Stores (NACS) show that actual student spending on course materials has dropped to less than half that amount. The result is an increasingly strong relationship between the affordability of course…

  • Academia

    Principles vs. Publishers

    June 3, 2016 - By 

    This is been an interesting week. Yesterday I made the decision to formally withdraw a chapter from an edited volume about themes for teaching Introductory Psychology. It was not an easy decision because I had put a lot of thought and energy into the chapter, made the necessary revisions, and even saw it accepted by the editors more than a year ago (a change in editorial staff at Cengage prompted the massive delay). So you can imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when I received a very curious email from a “Product Manager” at Cengage.