Choose Bodington...

Put material on the web quickly and easily.

Bodington has tools for very rapidly structuring resources and for uploading content. Much content can be typed directly into web forms. You do not need software other than the web browser installed on the user's computer but HTML and other authoring tools can be used to create material for uploading.

Control access to material quickly and easily.

Bodington has an access control system that is as flexible as a sophisticated network operating system. It starts from the basis of ownership of resources and authors can grant various levels of access to any users they choose. At the same time central control of access by administrators is also possible. In fact multiple layers of delegated administration are possible which is ideal for large organisations with departments. Access control can be adhoc by selecting individual users or coordinated by making use of central data sources such as staff payroll and student enrolment data. You are not limited in the way users are organised into groups - any tree structure of group names can be created and this can be linked into any data source that groups people.

Brand and customise for local look and feel.

Bodington uses an object oriented template system for presenting HTML and graphics. This makes it very easy to radically change its appearance. The object orientation means that you can selectively alter the appearance of different sections of your site to suit the needs of faculties, departments etc.

Run servers on Microsoft, Linux, UNIX, or Mac OS X platforms.

Bodington is written entirely in Java which means it will run on any operating system for which a Java runtime system is available. It will operate with several different database products through Java Database Connectivity (JDBC).

Run a reliable and scalable service for end users.

Bodington was created and is now being developed by teams of people who also have responsibility for running managed services for their universities. Problems with unreliablity have been corrected very rapidly and the developers are very highly motivated to fix any future problems fast.

Run services for tens of thousands of registered users.

At the University of Leeds where Bodington was created more than 15,000 users regularly use Bodington mounted on a single server. For its initial years of service Bodington ran on a very modest Pentium PC and so considerable effort went into optimising performance in terms of CPU loading and memory utilisation. Consequently, Bodington is delivering good performance to 15,000 users on a server that would cost around £6,000 at current prices (2005). A medium sized university could buy a server and a duplicate fail-over server for less than £10,000. Bodington is the only open source option with a track record of this kind of performance and scalability on low cost servers.

Give access to users on any platform using standard browsers.

Bodington does not rely on plugins or other client side software other than a normal web browser with style sheet support. These are available on many platforms including handheld devices and specialised equipment for the disabled.

Be part of a growing, thriving development community.

All of the larger adopters of Bodington are now contributing to development. They have all devoted some of their own funds to this effort but have also attracted outside funding, particularly from JISC to help their work. This means that the organisations who adopt Bodington can have a real involvement in shaping the future of the project to whatever level they can afford. You may even get the work paid for by one of the funding bodies if you are successful in putting together a project proposal or can contribute to another university's project.

Help shape future functionality.

By choosing Bodington you get immediate full access to the source code under a very liberal open source license. If choose you can work on your own private version of Bodington but you may reap much greater benefits and significantly reduce costs by joining with others to contribute to the functionality of future releases of the official Bodington.

Use software that is built specifically for Further and Higher Education.

Commercial VLEs are often optimised for the mass markets of corporate training and US K12 schools. Bodington could be used in both those environments but its developers have been mainly interested in serving the needs of higher and further education and so there are less problems with unsuitability.

Integrate access with partner organisations using built-in Shibboleth functionality.

Shibboleth is a technology for allowing access to many restricted access resources based on a single sign-on at the 'home' organisation. Shibboleth is rapidly being adopted by educational and government organisations worldwide and in the UK is being slated as the replacement for the Athens system. Bodington is capable of acting as a Shibboleth target site and as a Shibboleth origin site which means you can serve restricted access resources to selected students and/or staff of partner organisations and can give your students and staff access to the resources of partners and publishers based on their Bodington log-in. Since there is no license fee for Bodington and in particular no restriction on the number of users you are free to grant access to whoever you like. With commercial products you may find that your license fees would leap up significantly even if you could solve the problem of integrating with Shibboleth because licensing is based on number of users.

Keep in line with the JISC e-learning framework.

A number of Bodington development projects are funded by JISC in connection with the e-learning framework. The developers have a real interest in ensuring that this work continues.

Customise the source code to meet local needs.

The most detailed functionality of Bodington can be changed. For example, if your local regulations on assessment clash with the functionality of the Bodington Pigeon Hole tool for handing in and marking essays you can change the tool to fit your regulations rather than change the regulations to fit the tool. This will require some programming effort but you can probably buy that at quite low cost. As well as developers in universities and colleges there are software development companies that could do the work for you and at least one has considerable experience in working with Bodington source code already.

Free up more funds to support staff development, customisation, help desk etc.

You pay no annual licencing fee, no fee for updates or support and so this money that is saved can be directed towards more worthy activities.

Choose other software...

Be tied down to a fixed pedagogy.

A common approach in the design of VLE tools has been to first conceptualise 'the course' and then encapsulate the concept in the software. In the case of commercial products the concept of the course is often that of a corporate training scenario, i.e. materials to study plus quizes and no interaction with other students, tutors or formal assessment. In the case of free software born out of an academic scenario the concept is often based on the particular high-level educational theory favoured by the architect, i.e. both prescriptive and proscriptive. Consequently it is common for a university or college to either run many different products to suit the needs of all departments or to force departments to adopt teaching methods that suit a single product.

Fail in your obligation to support users with disabilities.

Commercial software vendors tend to put the minimum of effort (or less) into serving the needs of disabled users - just enough to avoid litigation. Bodington originates in a University that has an outstanding reputation for supporting disabled students and staff. While there is always room for improvement considerable effort has gone into making Bodington usable by all users and potential users above and beyond adherence to accessibility guidelines.

Pay an annual licence fee.

For a large university licensing one of the leading commercial VLEs in a version that integrates with local information systems and facilitates customisation, the annual license fee could be equivalent to the salaries of ten full time members of staff.

Pay for upgrades and support services.

You never stop paying for commercial VLE software and you have little ability to predict the cost in the future. You even pay to stop using it because you will need to apply significant staff effort to migrating to a competitor's product and may end up paying licensing fees to two companies during the change over period. Once you download Bodington, the installation file and the source code, you have an inalienable right to continue using it forever. The license does not allow the software to be withdrawn. If any one of the Bodington development partners chose to stop publishing updates to Bodington any of the other partners, including your organisation can continue the task.

Have little or no influence on future functionality

Commerical vendors do ask their customers how they would like the product to develop but your organisation is one small voice and you may be contradicted by bigger voices, including many US and UK corporate training departments.

Post Scriptum

You may be wondering why The University of Leeds and its partners want you to choose Bodington. After all you won't be paying us for it! The reason is simple - there is a good chance that at some point in the future you will contribute to the development and maintenance effort either in a small way by reporting bugs or in a big way by contributing significant new functionality. The more your organisation and organisations like yours contribute, the faster the software will develop, the faster bugs will be fixed, and the more the cost of this work will be spread out.

If you have any doubts about our motives ask your solicitor to study the Bodington software license. You will find that there is no hidden catch or trap by which you can be made to pay money for Bodington and even if The University of Leeds withdraws support for the project (very unlikely) the other users can simply rename the software and continue support and development work independently using the last version of the Bodington source code to be released from Leeds. In the worst case scenario you can use the last version you downloaded forever and with access to the source code you can work on it yourself to fix bugs and add the features that you need.

Unlike some open source licenses you are even free to make commercial use of Bodington and its source code (subject to some very basic conditions that protect the reputation of the originators). For example, a university with an established and stable IT department could offer managed services based on Bodington to colleges or schools. There is no obligation to share the revenue from this type of activity with the originators of the software.