NYU Manifold Tips & Resources

Manifold can record licensing and copyright information for your Projects as you provide it. Project Creators are encouraged to provide annotation and licensing information for any Texts and Resources in your Projects (through fields available in the Admin View). For more on how to enter this information, see the Metadata section of Manifold’s documentation.

The primary uses of NYU Manifold include Open Education Resources and Open Access materials, and it is anticipated that many projects will warrant the use of an open license. For original content that is meant to be open and reusable, Project Creators are strongly encouraged to apply an open license to the material, such as a Creative Commons license (see the Creative Commons License Chooser tool or the NYU Libraries’ research guide, Copyright: Creative Commons).

It’s important to note that you should only publish materials on Manifold that are either open access with a creative commons license, are available within the public domain, or that you yourself hold copyright over.

Bear in mind that Manifold is a service for self-publishing on the open web. Materials published on Manifold should be one or more of the following: 

1) Original materials that you created and own the copyright in

2) Copyrighted materials that are licensed for open distribution (such as with a Creative Commons license)

3) Materials that are in the public domain

4) Copyrighted materials that you are relying on fair use to use

5) Copyrighted material that you have obtained permission to use in your Manifold publication

It is helpful to link out to original media formats of resources you upload. You should also provide captions on any media you include citing the original source. 

• For an example of proper attribution, see the caption for Mycelium of Sound provided below, which includes a title, copyright holder permission, and source for the media item’s use:

Note that NYU Manifold has no mechanism for checking or enforcing copyright law; it depends on you to determine how copyright and/or fair use applies to their project. If you wish to present material that is still in copyright, you may need to request permissions from the authors (or authors' estates). 

NYU Libraries has several resources for helping with navigating copyright, the public domain, and open licensing. The Open Knowledge team can assist with understanding copyright and license terms, and NYU Libraries’ guide on Copyright can help with many of the questions creators might have about publishing their work online. Cornell University Library also provides this helpful chart for determining whether material is in the public domain. Finally, the Creative Reuse guide lays out several sources for public domain or reusable media to include in your projects, as well as resources for understanding fair use and best practices. For questions not answered in the Guides, you may contact open.access@nyu.edu. Please note that NYU Libraries can provide information on creative commons licenses and copyright requirements, but cannot provide legal advice.

Manifold was created with digital accessibility as a cornerstone of its design, and the platform aims to adhere to the latest WCAG 2 AA Standards (currently WCAG 2.1 AA) - the same standard as NYU’s digital accessibility policy. Digital accessibility is the practice of ensuring that websites, web applications, and digital content can be used by community members across a diverse range of hearing, movement, sight or cognitive abilities. While Manifold features are designed with accessibility as part of its infrastructure, you as a Manifold Creator are responsible for creating content that complies with these criteria.

Behind the scenes, Manifold is built to supplement HTML with Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) to connect with assistive technologies including screen readers. Most content in Manifold will adhere to these standards or will produce errors. However, it is important when creating to review tools for checking accessibility, and this is especially important with the more complex creation tools (e.g, editing Texts directly with HTML). E.g., as a general rule, do not edit the CSS styling of Texts within Manifold as this can contradict the accessibility design of the platform without throwing error messages.

Accessibility Best Practices

• Manifold was developed with web accessibility as a cornerstone in adherence to WCAG 2 AA Standards. By default, web pages and content for Manifold projects are compatible with assistive technologies, which means your Projects can and should adhere to accessibility standards with relative ease.
• In order to ensure you’re making the most of Manifold’s design and keeping projects accessible to all audiences, we recommend a few practices:
  • Provide alternate text for all images and media when allowed for by Manifold. These text descriptions should be less than 140 characters (for easier listening), use proper punctuation, and avoid overly complex sentence structure. This ensures the legibility of these resources through screen readers and keeps Manifold accessible!
  • Be sure to use headers and other text styles deliberately and consistently in your Texts and Markdown Blocks. Screen readers often treat text structures (e.g. Header 3, Title, Body, etc.) in specific ways, so it’s important to use these structures with consistency.
  • Make sure that your material is organized in a clear way - this will reduce the strain on readers following the layout of your project. 
  • Try to keep your text content as concise and clear as possible.
  • When incorporating iFrames to embed content from other websites, make sure that the content adheres to the same WCAG standards as Manifold.
  • Manifold video Resources now allow for captions, subtitles, and descriptions; including these text-readable features will enhance your Project’s multimedia accessibility

Please note: One known exception for accessible content in Manifold is the incompatibility of its annotation software with NVDA and JAWS screen readers (for more on this, please see the Manifold Annotation Accessibility documentation).

For more guidance on preparing accessible content on Manifold and checking the accessibility of your Project, check out NYU Library’s Digital Accessibility Checklist and these steps for testing online accessibility.

Further Accessibility Resources

While accessibility is necessary for some groups to use the web, it is beneficial for everyone. Below are some recommended resources to review when creating in Manifold:

Instructors should review NYU’s Guide for Affordable and Open Educational Resources for the kinds of materials and recommendations that NYU provides to facilitate affordable and open access materials. One of the key uses for Manifold is social annotations, and this feature is especially useful for teaching.

Krystyna Micheal at CUNY Manifold has developed this helpful guide with recommendations for how to use annotations in Manifold effectively for pedagogy. This includes principles behind social annotations and even particular assignment suggestions.

Reading Groups are an instructor’s best friend for organizing cohorts of students. By organizing a class of students in a Reading Group, you can group Resources and Texts across Projects, organize Projects themselves, and track all student annotations in different views. This ability to bridge Reading Groups is helpful if students will develop their own Manifold Projects for a course, but even if a class only uses one Project, it is still helpful to organize content and students through the layout that Reading Groups provide. For more information, see the Manifold documentation on Reading Groups.

Instructors can embed Resources or Resource collections within a Text passage. This can be especially helpful if there is a group of Resources instructors would like students to read alongside a particular day’s reading. Placing the entire Resource Collection as an annotation also allows you to avoid having to place each resource separately. For further details, see the Manifold documentation for Placing Resources.

There are many features within Manifold that make it ideal for course reading lists and showcasing textual or multimedia student projects. Compared to popular CMS options like Blackboard or Brightspace, Manifold is ideal for allowing students to annotate texts directly and engage with one another without relying on a separate discussion board. 

There are a few additional items teachers might run into or worry about when using Manifold for the classroom:

• Course readers: Manifold Reading Groups allows for adding markdown blocks and pulling material from NYU Manifold into one webpage, making it ideal for organizing course sections or reading groups. One thing to note is that in order for material to be included in a Reading Group, it must be included elsewhere on NYU Manifold as a Text or Resource, and must accordingly follow copyright best practices for fair use.
• Grading: Manifold allows you as a class project owner or administrator of a reading group to view all of the comments and annotations each student user makes within your class’s texts. This function is particularly useful for evaluating student participation or reading comprehension in online discussions. 
• Privacy and tracking student engagement: As a Project Creator, you can see all the annotations and annotation responses in your Texts, which makes Manifold easy to use for in-text class discussions and collaborative annotation. You can also see anonymized analytics for the Project’s total views but cannot see which students read a Text and when they do, unless they add annotations to the Text.
• Anonymous peer review: If you’re using a Reading Group for your class, you can anonymize user participation so that students can comment on texts or projects – including one another’s – with anonymity. Teachers should consider this option carefully given the objectives of their assigned coursework.
• Student projects: You can use Manifold Projects or Reading Groups to group together student work depending on the size of their projects. If each student is developing their own Projects with multimedia resources and/or multiple Texts, your best option is to create a Reading Group for your course that can reference each student project once they’re completed and contextualize readings with free text blocks. On the other hand, if students are only creating individual texts with embedded resources, it can be simpler to grant temporary editing permissions with students for a shared class Project so that each student can add their Texts without each creating individual Projects.