Starting Out as an Open Education Researcher

My journey as an open educator began when I was a faculty member teaching psychology at a public post-secondary institution in British Columbia, Canada. The provincial government had recently announced the creation of the BC Open Textbook Project, which invested $1 million to harvest, adapt, or create open textbooks for the 40 highest enrolled undergraduate courses across the province (BCcampus, n.d.). BCcampus, the government-funded agency that would lead this project, put out a call for faculty members who were interested in reviewing any of the open textbooks they had identified, using a standardized rubric and in exchange for a small stipend. I reached out to express my interest in reviewing one of the texts on their list, but also to share another that I had identified but that wasn’t on their list. Fortunately, they were happy to support both reviews. I say fortunate, because this work led me to adapt and adopt one of the texts (Lalonde, 2013,) while directly adopting the other. I immediately began to witness the positive effects of alleviating the financial burden of textbook costs on my students and, as a behavioural scientist, I knew I wanted to explore this through an empirical lens.

Soon after, when BCcampus issued a call for applications for Faculty Fellows in Open Education, I didn’t hesitate. As one of three faculty fellows for a one-year term, I gave feedback to BCcampus on their outreach strategy, while engaging in advocacy within my institution and across the province. I also had the opportunity to engage in my first open education research project, which included Beck Pitt from the renown OER Research Hub. Given the fellows’ focus on advocacy, we were particularly interested in the perceptions and experiences related to open educational resources (OER) of other faculty members across the province. The result was a report that investigated the OER use of 78 faculty members across 17 post-secondary institutions (Jhangiani, Pitt, et al., 2016), including their motivations and perceptions, as well as factors that enabled or inhibited OER use and adaptation. As a psychologist, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to inject a brief assessment of personality traits that might predict the use of OER, including openness to experience (as it turns out, openness does indeed predict the use and adaptation of OER).

This experience working with BCcampus turned out to be the first in a series of collaborations in support of OER advocacy, including as a faculty workshop facilitator with the Open Textbook Network (now known as the Open Education Network), as well as with OER creation and advocacy with the OER universitas (led by Dr. Wayne Mackintosh of the OER Foundation) and the NOBA Project (which focuses on OER within Psychology, my home discipline). These additional experiences prompted me to reflect further on different approaches to OER advocacy, once again drawing on psychological theory as an explanatory framework (Jhangiani, 2017b).

Together with Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, senior editor of the NOBA Project, I realized that the field of psychology needed an accessible primer that would advance comprehension of open education, so, with the support of the Association for Psychological Science, we initiated work on an edited volume (Jhangiani & Biswas-Diener, 2017). The volume invited contributions from leading scholars and practitioners in not only open education, but also the related fields of open access and open science. Although it commenced as a project that would focus on open practices within the discipline of psychology, it quickly evolved to consider open education, open scholarship, and open science more broadly.

Back in my faculty role, I elected to focus my research efforts on the student experience with OER, using a combination of complementary methodologies. First, through an online survey of undergraduate students enrolled in courses at post-secondary institutions across the province that had been identified by BCcampus as using open textbooks (Jhangiani & Jhangiani, 2017), and second, through a quasi-experimental study in which the same instructors taught multiple sections of Introductory Psychology using either the incumbent commercial textbook, a digital version of an open textbook, or a print version of the same open textbook (Jhangiani et al., 2018). Whereas the first study advanced understanding of the scale of the problem of textbook affordability within our province (e.g., over half of the respondents reported not purchasing a required textbook due to cost at least once and only 18% reported being unaffected by the cost of textbooks), the second study demonstrated that students assigned open textbooks (in either format) performed either the same as or better than those assigned commercial textbooks. In short, not only was the use of OER mitigating a range of negative educational outcomes (e.g., dropping courses or enrolling in fewer courses due to textbook costs), but OER was perceived as equivalent in quality to commercial textbooks by students and resulted in equivalent learning outcomes, while holding the instructor factor constant. Taken together, these studies made a powerful argument in favour of OER adoption, and crucially, with local data.

Advancing Open Education Research in Leadership Roles

About a year later, I had the opportunity to return to BCcampus as a Senior Open Education Advocacy and Research Fellow, which enabled me to support a new cohort of open education fellows while helping design some system-level archival research. In this case we analyzed BCcampus’ growing database of reported OER adoptions to get a better sense of the different pathways to OER adoption (Barker et al., 2018). We were able to identify a set of eight patterns, including “infection” wherein OER adoption spreads from one faculty champion within an academic department to several others, “stealth adoption” wherein OER may be used without being reported or officially sanctioned, and “committee adoption” wherein departmental committees choose to adopt OER as the standard textbook across all offerings of a given course.

My increasing involvement of leadership within my university, including leadership within the Centre for Teaching and Learning, coincided with my deepening interest in the broader spectrum of open educational practices (OEP), including what came to be known as open pedagogy, inspired by the scholarship of people like Catherine Cronin (2017) and Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams (Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter, 2018). I was drawn to this approach because it not only drew on the power of open licensing but also the important tradition of critical pedagogy. The lens of OEP widened the focus from questions of access and affordability to the importance of learner agency and the cultivation of critical consciousness (DeRosa & Jhangiani, 2017). I documented the increasing focus on OEP within the Canadian context as part of work as an ambassador for the global advocacy of OER with the International Council on Open and Distance Education (Ossiannilsson et al., 2020).

I also wrote and theorized about open pedagogy, often in partnership with my ongoing collaborator Dr. Robin DeRosa with whom I created the Open Pedagogy Notebook (DeRosa & Jhangiani, 2018). In doing so I observed that just as it took intention and effort to ensure that OER was advancing social justice (Hodgkinson-Williams & Trotter, 2018), OEP could also be embraced uncritically, including in ways that led to neutral or even negative outcomes (Jhangiani, 2019b). The social justice framework for OEP that I co-published with Maha Bali and Catherine Cronin outlined how OEP could be content-centric or process-centric, instructor-centric or learner-centric, and primarily pedagogical or primarily social justice focused (Bali, Cronin, & Jhangiani, 2020). This work reflected the increasingly critical conversations about OEP, which my collaborators and I collated in the volume Open at the Margins (Bali, Cronin, Czerniewicz, et al., 2020).

In the meantime, my move into senior administration (which included oversight of our growing supports for open education) fueled a desire to evaluate my university’s flagship zero textbook cost program, including the impact on student enrolment, persistence, and performance by analyzing four years of institutional data (Jhangiani et al., in press). It also led me to seriously consider the many facets of institutional capacity to support OEP, including policies, partnerships, professional development, and more. In collaboration with colleagues from across five other BC institutions, I helped develop and validate an instrument to self-assess institutional capacity to support OEP (Morgan et al., 2021).

When I moved to a university located in Ontario, I worked with colleagues to update and refine the instrument (now known as the ISAT 2; Jhangiani, Pakkal, et al., 2024a) before embarking on an assessment of the capacity to support OEP of universities, colleges, and Indigenous institutes across the province (Jhangiani, Pakkal, et al., 2024b). The success of this project has since led to a partnership with BCcampus to conduct a similar assessment across all BC institutions, which is currently in progress (Jhangiani, Pakkal, Lalonde, et al., 2025).

As my research team, known as the Inclusive Education Research Lab, continues to grow, so does our program of research on OEP, which includes experimental research to look at student perceptions of course syllabi that foreground OEP in concert with social justice frames (Pakkal et al., 2025), a survey of undergraduate students to investigate their experiences with course materials, with particular focus on the experiences of first generation students (Jhangiani, Pakkal, Morrison, et al., 2025), and an investigation of how structural, relational, and pedagogical exclusion in academic settings can heighten social identity threats and adversely affect students’ well-being and academic success (Pakkal & Zabin, 2025).

Common Themes

As I look back at my open education scholarship over the last decade, which includes two edited volumes, ten peer-reviewed journal articles, 13 book chapters, three white papers and other public reports, and over 100 conference presentations or workshops, I notice seven patterns or underlying dynamics worth highlighting.

1. Evolving research questions

The focus of my scholarship has evolved over time, from establishing a base of evidence to better understand OER adoption and its impact to considering frameworks for OEP. I have sought to collect local data where this was missing while also conducting system-level research, including institutional capacity assessment across several jurisdictions. Through it all, my focus and level of analysis has reflected my role and goals, whether as a faculty advocate, institutional lead for teaching and learning, or senior academic administrator.

2. Advancing theory and practice

In addition to developing theoretical frameworks (Bali, Cronin, & Jhangiani, 2020) and conducting a wide range of empirical studies, I have alternated between authoring accessible primers on topics such as open educational practices (Jhangiani & Jhangiani, 2024) and supporting open education from the library (Jhangiani & Green, 2019), sharing practical experiences in domains such as open textbook development (Jhangiani, Green, et al., 2016), integrating OER/ZTC course marking (Jhangiani, 2020), building institutional open education initiatives (Jhangiani, 2019a), and writing system level reports, including in BC (Jhangiani, Pitt, et al., 2016), Ontario (Jhangiani et al., 2024b), and Ireland (Jhangiani, Farrelly, et al., 2024).

3. Selecting complementary methods

From online surveys to archival studies and quasi-experimental and experimental research, my work has spanned a wide variety of research methods. In some cases, these approaches were chosen to complement one another (e.g., faculty vs. student perceptions of OER), while in other cases a combination of studies permitted triangulation of findings (e.g., analyses of archival student record data vs. quasi-experimental research to look at the impact of OER adoption). Along with reusing or adapting commonly used scales that measure the impact of textbook costs on students, I co-developed, validated, and refined a new standardized instrument to address an identified gap in the field.

4. Carefully choosing outlets

While most of my scholarship has been published in interdisciplinary journals, including those devoted to open education or the scholarship of teaching and learning, I deliberately sought to publish some of my work within outlets within my home discipline, including by co-editing a special issue of Psychology Learning and Teaching (Jhangiani et al., 2019), and leveraging the platforms and conferences of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (Jhangiani, 2017a; Jhangiani, 2022). However, all of my scholarship in open education has been published open access, whether by working with platinum open access journals, availing of funding to cover article processing charges in the case of hybrid journals, and/or ensuring that the post-prints or at least pre-prints are available in an open repository.

5. Collaborating widely

Although I have often responded to calls for proposals, I have also initiated a range of collaborative projects, including edited volumes and special issues of journals. I have often co-published with fellow advocates (e.g., other BCcampus faculty fellows or ICDE OER ambassadors), but also with colleagues within my academic department or wider discipline. In my experience the “secret sauce” of success in open education scholarship is working with incredible collaborators with whom you share values and goals. This is why, for example, I have so thoroughly enjoyed working—on articles, edited volumes, keynotes, workshops, and the Open Pedagogy Notebook—with the brilliant Dr. Robin DeRosa as well as a growing list of publications with my partner Dr. Surita Jhangiani.

6. Embracing open science practices

Over the years, I have worked to embrace open science practices that extend beyond ensuring that I am publishing my findings in open access outlets. In the early days this required educating Research Ethics Boards concerning principles of open data when this was still relatively uncommon, but these are now standard practices in my research lab. Open science practices are particularly important when one is both an open education advocate and a researcher, as they ensure that the research process is rigorous and transparent. For example, pre-registering one’s hypotheses on the Open Science Framework is a powerful guard against hypothesizing after the results are known (also known as HARKing; Kerr, 1998) and sharing one’s data in an open repository mitigates the data malpractice known as P-hacking (Head et al., 2015). There is, of course, also a wonderful internal consistency from embracing the trifecta of openness—research on open education conducted using open science practices and published in open access journals.

7. Prioritizing mentorship and training

Having benefited from wonderful mentorship as an OER Research Fellow with the Open Education Group, I have sought to mentor and support emerging scholars, including graduate students and early career scholars, as well as those who are simply new to research in open education. This has included serving on doctoral committees, providing formal mentorship to subsequent BCcampus faculty fellows, supporting the Global OER Graduate Network, creating an Open Education Research Fellowship within my university, and planning and hosting an Open Education Research Institute. This mentorship continues today as I support doctoral, master’s, and undergraduate students in my lab, several of whom are now first authors on our research projects.

Conclusion

My journey as an open education scholar thus far has been immensely rewarding. It has certainly helped inform my practice as an educator as well as my approach to developing institutional policies, procedures, and programs, and establishing and evaluating structural supports as an academic administrator. While I hope that my work has assisted open pedagogues and practitioners by helping inform their important work, being an open education researcher has connected me with a large community of deeply committed, driven, and gifted researchers around the world whose own work continued to enrich my understanding. I am grateful that this community now includes many collaborators and friends. Our collective efforts make a meaningful difference, including by helping support efforts to widen equitable access to education, reimagine how learning environments may be (re)designed to be more just, and ultimately advance societal transformation. I would argue that this work has never been more important.

References

Bali, M., Cronin, C., Czerniewicz, L., DeRosa, R., & Jhangiani, R. S. (Eds). (2020). Open at the margins: Critical perspectives on open education. Rebus. https://press.rebus.community/openatthemargins/

Bali, M., Cronin, C., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2020). Framing open educational practices from a social justice perspective. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2020(1), pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.5334/jime.565

Barker, J., Jeffery, K., Jhangiani, R. S., & Veletsianos, G. (2018). Eight patterns of open textbook adoption in British Columbia. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 19(3), 320-334. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v19i3.3723

BCcampus. (n.d.). Our history. https://open.bccampus.ca/our-history/

Cronin, C. (2017). Openness and praxis: Exploring the use of open educational practices in higher education. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(5). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i5.3096

DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R. S. (2017). Open pedagogy. In L. Mays (Ed.), A Guide to Making Open Textbooks with Students. Rebus Foundation. https://press.rebus.community/makingopentextbookswithstudents/chapter/open-pedagogy/

DeRosa, R. & Jhangiani, R. S. (2018). Open pedagogy notebook: Sharing practices, building community. https://openpedagogy.org/

Head, M. L., Holman, L., Lanfear, R., Kahn, A. T., & Jennions, M. D. (2015). The extent and consequences of P-hacking in science. PLOS Biology, 13(3). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1002106

Hodgkinson-Williams, C. A., & Trotter, H. (2018). A social justice framework for understanding open educational resources and practices in the global south. Journal of Learning for Development, 5(3). https://doi.org/10.56059/jl4d.v5i3.312

Jhangiani, R. S. (2017a). Ditching the “Disposable assignment” in favor of open pedagogy. In W. Altman & L. Stein (Eds.), Essays from E-xcellence in Teaching. https://teachpsych.org/E-xcellence-in-Teaching-Blog/4583103

Jhangiani, R. S. (2017b). Pragmatism vs. idealism and the identity crisis of OER advocacy. Open Praxis, 9(2), 141-150. http://dx.doi.org/10.5944/openpraxis.9.2.569

Jhangiani, R. S. (2019a). A recipe for a successful institutional open education initiative. WCET Frontiers. https://wcet.wiche.edu/frontiers/2019/02/06/successful-institutional-open-education-initiative/

Jhangiani, R. S. (2019b). Delivering on the promise of open educational resources: Pitfalls and strategies. In K. Zhang, C. J. Bonk, T. C. Reeves, & T. H. Reynolds (Eds.), MOOCs and Open Education Across Emerging Economies: Challenges, Successes, and Opportunities. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Jhangiani, R. S. (2020). Kwantlen Polytechnic University. In S. Hare, J. Kirschner, & M. Reed (Eds.), Marking OER Courses: Best Practices and Case Studies. Arlington, TX: Mavs Open Press. https://uta.pressbooks.pub/markingopenandaffordablecourses/

Jhangiani, R. S. (2022, October 21). Critical, open, and inclusive pedagogies: Centering social justice in the teaching of psychology [Keynote address]. Annual Conference on Teaching, Society for the Teaching of Psychology, Pittsburgh, PA, United States.

Jhangiani, R. S., & Biswas-Diener, R. (Eds.) (2017). Open: The philosophy and practices that are revolutionizing education and science. Ubiquity Press. https://doi.org/10.5334/bbc

Jhangiani, R. S., Farrelly, T., & O Suilleabhain, G. (2024). Open educational practices in higher education: Focusing on responsiveness, innovation, and inclusivity. Munster Technological University. https://www.transforminglearning.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Open-Educational-Practices.pdf

Jhangiani, R. S. & Green, A. (2019). An open athenaeum: Creating an institutional home for open pedagogy. In A. Wesolek, J. Lashley, & A. Langley (Eds.), OER: A Field Guide for Academic Librarians. Pacific University Press. https://boisestate.pressbooks.pub/oer-field-guide/

Jhangiani, R. S., Green, A., & Belshaw, J. D. (2016). Multiple approaches to open textbook development: Lessons learned from three disciplines. In P. Blessinger & T. J. Bliss (Eds.), Open Education: International Perspectives in Higher Education (pp. 179-197). Open Book Publishers.

Jhangiani, R. S., Hardin, E. E., & Beers, M. J. (2019). Introduction to the special issue: Open educational practices. Psychology Learning and Teaching, 18(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/1475725718814354

Jhangiani, R. S., & Jhangiani, S. (2017). Investigating the perceptions, use, and impact of open textbooks: A survey of post-secondary students in British Columbia. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 18(4), 172-192. http://dx.doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v18i4.3012

Jhangiani, R. S. & Jhangiani, S. (2024). Open educational practices. In Súilleabháin, G. Ó., Lanclos, D., & Farrelly, T. (Eds.), How to Use Digital Learning with Confidence and Creativity: A Practical Introduction. Elgar Publishing.

Jhangiani, R. S., Dastur, F. N., LeGrand, R., & Penner, K. (2018). As good or better than commercial textbooks: Students’ perceptions and outcomes from using open digital and open print textbooks. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 9(1). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotl-rcacea.2018.1.5

Jhangiani, R. S., Pakkal, O., Lachaîne, C., & Luke, R. (2024a). Institutional self-assessment tool, version 2 (ISAT2). https://openlibrary.ecampusontario.ca/item-details/#/2ed81854-c5a6-4811-8f8c-8ac4bc71fd2f

Jhangiani, R. S., Pakkal, O., Lachaîne, C., & Luke, R. (2024b). On a path to open: A report on the capacity of Ontario’s post-secondary institutions to support open educational practices. eCampusOntario. https://ecampusontario.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/On-a-Path-to-Open-EN-tagged.pdf

Jhangiani, R. S., Pakkal, O., Lalonde, C., Gray, J., & Rong, W. (2025). Assessing the maturity and capacity of BC’s post-secondary institutions to support open educational practices. Manuscript in preparation.

Jhangiani, R. S., Pakkal, O., Morrison, L., & Rong, W. (2025). 2024 student course materials survey. https://inclusiveeducationlab.com/2024-student-course-materials-survey/

Jhangiani, R. S., Pakkal, O., & Xiao, X. (in press). The multi-year impact of Canada’s first zero textbook initiative. Open Praxis.

Jhangiani, R. S., Pitt, R., Hendricks, C., Key, J., & Lalonde, C. (2016). Exploring the use of open educational resources at BC post-secondary institutions. BCcampus. https://bccampus.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/BCFacultyUseOfOER_final2.pdf

Kerr, N. L. (1998). HARKing: Hypothesizing after the results are known. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 2(3), 196-217. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0203_4

Lalonde, C. (2013, December 3). Exactly what we hoped would happen with open textbooks. ClintLalonde.net. https://clintlalonde.net/2013/12/03/exactly-what-we-hoped-would-happen-with-open-textbooks/

Morgan, T., Childs, E., Hendricks, C., Harrison, M., DeVries, I., & Jhangiani, R. S. (2021). How are we doing with open educational practice initiatives? Applying an institutional self-assessment tool in five educational institutions. International Review of Research in Open & Distance Education, 22(4). https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v22i4.5745

Ossiannilsson, E., Zhang, X., Wetzler, J., Gusmão, C. M. G., Aydin, C. H., Jhangiani, R. S., Glapa-Grossklag, J., Makoe, M., & Harichandan, D. (2020). From open educational resources to open educational practices: Moving from the margins to the mainstream. Distance and Mediation of Knowledge: Special Issue on Open Educational Resources. https://doi.org/10.4000/dms.5393

Pakkal, O., Twele, A., Gwozdz, L., & Jhangiani, R. S. (in press). An investigation into student perceptions of social justice frames in a course syllabus. Open Praxis.

Pakkal, O. & Zabin, R. (2025, April 9). Access, affordability, and inclusion: Student perspectives on open educational resources [Conference presentation]. 2025 Mapping New Knowledges Research Conference, St. Catharines, ON, Canada.

About the author

name: Rajiv Jhangiani, Ph.D.

institution: Brock University

Dr. Rajiv Jhangiani is the Vice Provost, Teaching and Learning at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, where he holds faculty appointments in the Departments of Educational Studies and Psychology, directs the Inclusive Education Research Lab, and is affiliated with the Social Justice Research Institute and the Social Justice and Equity Studies program. A global leader in open education, his scholarship focuses on open educational practices, student-centered pedagogies, and ethical approaches to educational technology. Dr. Jhangiani has advised the British Columbia Ministry of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills on its Digital Learning Strategy and Ethical Educational Technology Toolkit. He served as an Ambassador for the Global Advocacy of OER with the International Council for Open and Distance Education and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Open Education Global.

https://bsky.app/profile/profjhangiani.bsky.social

https://scholar.social/@rajiv