Manifold in the Classroom: Digital Publishing and Social Annotations

Manifold, a digital publishing platform that is a collaboration between the CUNY Graduate Center, University of Minnesota Press, and a web development firm called Cast Iron Coding, gives you the ability to create beautiful, multimodal teaching materials with a powerful social annotation tool. Manifold is a grant-funded, open source project that was originally created to support open access publications at University Presses, but has since been developed as an Open Educational Resources platform as well. Today, there are over 40 individual instances of Manifold at use in University Presses, journals, libraries, university systems, and digital humanities centers. CUNY’s instance of Manifold has always been dedicated to teaching. It is both a repository of OER texts that anyone can use in their classrooms and a platform on which anyone at CUNY can create materials to teach with or publish their own or their students’ work. CUNY’s instance of Manifold is lucky to have a dedicated open educational technologist named Robin Miller at the Graduate Center who supports faculty at all 25 of CUNY’s campuses, including Hostos, to create and use materials on CUNY’s Manifold instance.

Three aspects of Manifold make it a particularly powerful teaching tool: first, it is an easy to use digital publishing tool with support at CUNY. Second, it supports the addition of multimodal resources to your texts. And third, it has a robust annotation tool that allows you to create a range of reading and writing activities.

First, as a publishing tool, you can use Manifold to create custom readings, course packs, or textbooks from materials that are either openly licensed or in the public domain. Manifold is responsive, meaning it displays as well on a desktop, laptop, tablet, and phone, an important feature for our students who increasingly do more and more of their work on their phones and do not always have access to WiFi. The reading interface is accessible and customizable – it can be switched from light to dark mode, and all the extras like resources and annotations can be turned on or off depending on the reader’s preference.

Second, in terms of resources – you can add auxiliary materials, including files, photos, video, links, and PDF’s to your Manifold project. These resources can be displayed in two ways – they can be embedded right into the text where they are relevant so your students see the resource in context of the assigned text, or resources can be grouped in resource collections that display on the project’s home page and can be organized however you like – by chapter, theme, resource type, etc.

Third, Manifold’s annotation tool allows you and your students to leave annotations on texts, and to reply to each others’ annotations in reading groups that can be set to either public so anyone can see them, or private so they are only viewable by members of the group. This social annotation feature, combined with the capacity to add embedded resources, are powerful tools, particularly for community college students approaching difficult texts. We as educators know where our students are and can add in videos, links to external websites, PDF’s of related articles, etc. to help contextualize the texts we are asking them to read. We can also create annotations that explain difficult passages, define specialized vocabulary, and pose questions and ask students to respond.

Explore CUNY’s Manifold home page to see some of the exciting things your colleagues have created, and reach out to Robin Miller at rmiller2@gc.cuny.edu at the Graduate Center if you would like to discuss building teaching materials or using existing teaching materials on Manifold. Before coming to Hostos as an Assistant Professor of English, I worked as an open educational technologist at the Graduate Center on Manifold, am still on the development team, and am also happy to discuss ideas; you can contact me at kmichael@hostos.cuny.edu.