Supporting Open Textbook Creation
Jojo Karlin; Krystyna Michael; and Robin Miller
The City University of New York (CUNY), the United States’ largest urban public university, comprises 25 campuses that range in size from 1,000 to 30,000 enrolled students and include two-year community colleges, four-year senior colleges, and graduate and professional schools. At CUNY, OER support is distributed across campuses and resides variously within libraries, educational technology offices, and/or centers for teaching and learning. In this case study, we present ways Manifold has been used at CUNY to support open textbook creation and open pedagogy.
Manifold is a digital publishing platform developed through a collaboration between the University of Minnesota Press, The City University of New York Graduate Center, and Cast Iron Coding. It was originally designed for academic publishers, but has increasingly been used by colleges and universities as both a platform for publishing open educational resources and an OER repository. Manifold was built with a dual focus: to bridge the gap in scholarly publishing between primary sources and the supplemental multimedia materials that contextualize and inform these sources and to bring scholarly conversations into the margins of monographs. Manifold is a web application that allows users to publish dynamic projects that are usually centered around a main open access or public domain text—or a series of texts—and supplementary multimedia resources. Each institution’s Manifold instance organizes its projects in a library of OER that are available for others to use and remix.
At CUNY, Manifold lowers barriers of cost and accessibility to students. Manifold publications are freely and easily available to students, who can read without signing in and can adjust margins, select light or dark mode, and adjust font size and serif to suit their optimal reading. Manifold is deeply committed to accessibility and has partnered with a team at the University of Washington to thoroughly test the app and optimize it for accessibility, particularly as it relates to screen reader users. All actions to create and read on Manifold can be done with either a mouse or a keyboard. As with Hypothes.is and other online tools, Manifold has grappled to solve the issue of accessible annotation and will release new fixes in version 7.
CUNY has a single instance of Manifold that serves as a central location for OER; CUNY Manifold features texts and course readers created by individual instructors, textbooks authored by grant-funded teams, and student publications. What follows is a series of examples that illustrate how CUNY has utilized Manifold in various ways.
1. Common Open Access Course Texts
A 19th-century American Literature graduate student instructor found that his students were often reading different versions of varying quality of the public domain texts he assigned. This made references to the text in class and in student essays diffi