Overview of the Bodington System

History of the Bodington System

For those who are interested here is a short history of the origins of the Bodington System by the author of the software Jon Maber.

The TLTP was a UK government funded program that funded a few dozen projects in UK universities that were involved with embedding the use of IT into courses. One funded project was called BioNet TLTP and consisted of a consortium of Biology departments across the country. This project was not about writing software but was more to do with providing a network for university teachers of biology to share their experiences of mixing and matching commercial software and homegrown material and using this software in courses. One of my interests in this project was the use of standard productivity tools in teaching. For example, I looked at the use of spreadsheets by students to "experiment" with the mathematical models they are studying. Within the Biochemistry Department at Leeds, I was responsible for creating a new level one module at the time of the TLTP project. Putting the two things together I set out to try to use IT within this project without writing any subject specific software. My first experience of getting my students to collaborate on-line was using the Internet News system (Usenet).

My early experiences of group communication with students was not encouraging. The software we used, Trumpet News, was complex to use and a number of features of the news system were off-putting to the students. For example, since contributions were sent to the group via e-mail there was a delay for the poster before seeing the message - this often led to multiple postings on the same topic. Also, at the time it was impractical to set up user names and passwords for the NNTP server at Leeds so postings were not private. Student were greatly inhibited from revealing any holes in their understanding of the topic under discussion and so were reluctant to post questions or contribute to discussions.

After hunting for alternative software solutions for these problems without success, I gave up and wrote something myself. This was called the Forum. The Forum was a web-based list of discussion topics into which users could post messages in a threaded structure. Staff could create new discussion topics and select lists of students to grant access to the discussion. Key features were a participants list so that students could see exactly who could read their postings and a readership list that listed people who had read any selected message.

As part of TLTP activities I demonstrated the Forum around the University of Leeds at a number of events and a number of departments registered their interest in getting access to the server. At around the same time a new unit was being put together in the University called the Teaching and Learning Support Unit and I was seconded part time to the unit to run the Forum for the University as a whole. (A few years ago the TLSU was dissolved and a new unit, the Flexible Learning Development Unit, was created.) At that time I was doing the job of writing the software, supporting users and maintaining the server two and a half days a week with others in the Unit doing some of the work of promoting the service and providing a point of contact while I was working in Biochemistry. In those early days levels of usage were quite low but with limited staffing in the TLSU it was clear that we needed a software product that was so easy to use that it wouldn't need too much support.

Alongside the forum we set up a new service for delivering practice multiple choice papers to students.

After running the forum for a year or two it became clear that we needed to rewrite the software for a number of reasons. We wanted to allow the grouping of resources, we wanted to be able to delegate management of areas of the web site to staff in departments of the University, we wanted to introduce more functionality and we wanted to introduce the metaphor of a building to allow clearer navigation around the web site.

All the important buildings on the University of Leeds campus are named after people of note who have been connected with the University and the people in the unit decided we should do the same with this 'imaginary' building on our web site. We requested, via the appropriate University committees, that the building be named after the first vice chancellor of the University - Sir Nathan Bodington.

The Nathan Bodington Building had a floor for each department of the University and we delegated responsibility the each floor to the department itself. Departments can create any structure of suites of rooms within their floor as is appropriate according to the way courses and course modules are structured.

While the Nathan Bodington Building is primarily intended for use by students, we realised there were other uses for the system beyond the actual delivery of courses. For example, staff developers may want to use it or faculty teams may wish to use the discussion facilities to help develop teaching methods. To allow this kind of expansion we rearranged the web site so that now Bodington Common is the top level in the web site and the Nathan Bodington Building is just one building among several others.