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).
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’s Scholarly Communication and Information Policy unit (SCIP) helps the NYU community navigate sharing scholarly work, including through platforms like Manifold. If you have questions and want to learn more about copyright or fair use, please consult NYU’s Copyright Guide. To learn more about Open Access, please see NYU’s Open Access Guide. 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.
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.