This month’s Resource Highlight was contributed by Anne Marie Gruber, Liaison & Textbook Equity Librarian at University of Northern Iowa.

Manifold is an open-source software supported by Cast Iron Coding, University of Minnesota Press, and the CUNY Graduate Center’s Digital Scholarship Lab. It allows for creating beautiful, accessible web-based publications, including Open Access texts and Open Educational Resources (OER).

UNI has been participating in a Manifold pilot offered by the Open Education Network (OEN) since spring 2022. The pilot concludes soon, so I’m reflecting on the experience. UNI participated because we previously did not have OER authoring software such as Pressbooks and because we wanted to deepen our support for OER authoring on our campus as well as participate in a community of like-minded open educators.

UNI’s Rod Library has collaborated with faculty who are creating OER, and have 4 completed projects in Manifold with 2 forthcoming. Of the 6 projects, 5 were funded through our recent UNI Textbook Equity Mini-Grant program. In addition, I recently mocked up a small sample anthology of public domain materials for a faculty member interested in moving away from the expensive print anthology they currently require in an upper-level course. Many of the readings the instructor assigns from the commercial text are in the public domain, so if we create our own anthology we can save students considerably.

I have appreciated many things about Manifold:

• The back-end is intuitive and flexible to accommodate many projects and projects types, even entire book series or journals.
• Its features include collaborative annotation and device/browser-responsive design.
• The software is strong on accessibility and can support many project types. The next version of Manifold (version 8) will include editing right in the software, so that will be great!
• Documentation is robust and public.
• Hosting options are flexible, with a paid hosted option available, or institutions can host themselves or through a 3rd party.

Our process here at UNI is for faculty OER authors to create content in a software comfortable for them (usually Google Docs or Word). Manifold supports Docs, HTML, EPUB, .docx, and Markdown. Quite literally content already created in one of those formats can be ingested into Manifold in just a few clicks; it’s rendered beautifully in Manifold to provide a true ebook experience. I usually take care of the ebook design and production, which is possible because Manifold makes it easy. Feedback has been very positive from authors. Even those with strong opinions about their ebook’s design have been so pleased. While it’s too early to have any feedback from students because the first OER books Rod Library published in Manifold are in use this semester, I’m looking forward to touching base with instructors about how their students found the experience. If the annotations and usage stats on our projects are any indication, students are really diving into the texts!

Authors seem to appreciate the ease of use and the ability to include supplemental materials.  For example, one of our recent OER textbooks, Elements of Creative Writing, includes published writings from the North American Review, the oldest literary magazine in the U.S., published here at UNI. The OER authors, also NAR’s editors, filled a gap in available creative writing textbooks while opening up the pages of the magazine as a renewable source of diverse readings in fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction.

The support from Manifold staff and users (via email and a Slack channel) has been truly incredible. In particular, Terence Smyre at University of Minnesota Press and Robin Miller at CUNY Graduate Center have been responsive and supportive as I’ve learned the ropes.

To see completed UNI OER projects in Manifold, click each book cover:

All public projects from the OEN Manifold pilot are available at: manifold.open.umn.edu/projects/ 

For examples from the broader Manifold community, see Manifold Community. Open pedagogy projects, with students as creators, are particularly inspiring; two of my favorites created via Manifold are:

• We Eat: A Student-Centered Cookbook (CUNY)
  “This project is a pedagogical experiment in mindful and experiential learning that came to fruition during the Spring 2020 Futures Initiative course Introduction to Engaged Teaching and Transformative Learning in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Inside this book, you will find photos, recipes, and stories from our class community. This project was sponsored by the Futures Initiative and The Graduate Center, CUNY.”
• My Slipper Floated Away: New American Memoirs (CUNY)
  “An anthology of fresh, compelling essays written by students at Lehman College in the Bronx. The writers are immigrants or the children of immigrants and/or POC.”

Does your institution need software for OER creation and/or adaptation? Check out Manifold!