Overview of the Bodington System

Why Choose the Bodington System for Your VLE?

The University of Leeds has no vested interest in persuading anyone to use the Bodington System instead of a commercial VLE product and it may not be the best choice for you but here are some pros and cons to help you decide.

• Students and Staff like it
  No software product is loved by all its users but we have a lot of positive feedback from our users and some of the best comments we've had have been from people who have used other VLE software. It would do you no harm to download it and try it out.
• You can make it work your way
  VLE software commonly has options to change the colour of the buttons or add a banner to the top of the page. On the other hand, that's often as far as it goes. For non-US users it is often very irritating that it is impossible to correct regional terminology such as the differing use of the words "faculty", "course" etc. on either side of the Atlantic. Most of the text and all of the graphics delivered by the Bodington System exist in a templates folder and can be edited. Global changes can be made, for example you could change the term "pigeon hole" to "essay slot" in the pigeon hole tool, or you can create style sub-folders in the templates folder and give different parts of the web site a different look and feel. Simple editing of template files could be used to make quite radical changes to the user interface. For example, you could put the navigation bar at the bottom of the page.
• It's more accessible
  Recent legislation in the UK is concentrating the minds of decision makers who are choosing VLEs. While we are prepared to admit that the Bodington System may not be perfect as far as accessibility goes we believe it is far ahead of the main commercial alternatives.
• It's more international
  Wherever users enter text into a web form they can enter Unicode text. That means people can have a discussion in Japanese, create a questionnaire in Arabic, devise a multiple choice test using international phonetic symbols or use any other modern language freely.
• It's free - permanently
  Our software licence allows you to use the software for as long as you like at no charge. You can modify it as much as you like so even if the University of Leeds stops development as a last resort you could fix bugs yourself. By comparison it's common for the commercial concerns to charge a very large annual fee although some will provide a version with some functionality removed at a lower price. If you're paying an annual license there is a danger that fees may increase in the future when you may feel that you're locked into the product. Worse still, software companies sometimes fold and get bought up by rivals and in such circumstances you can start to feel a bit out on a limb.

• There is no Help Line
  When you pay an annual fee to a commercial software company part of that fee pays for support. You may be supplied with contact details for a support team. The Bodington System is provided, as is, take it or leave it. Since you aren't paying the University of Leeds we can't employ support staff to support your use of the software. The best we can do is to develop more and more on-line documentation for you. However, since you aren't paying an annual license for the software you ought to have money spare in your budget to provide your own support. This will depend on the size of your organisation. What budget? If you're really at the start of this process and haven't thought about budgets yet consider this: your VLE is just as important as your student information system so the scale of planning and budget ought to be at a similar order of magnitude.
• The Development Team is small
  If bugs are identified it could take us a while to fix them because we are just a small unit within a university and we don't have rooms full of programmers working on the software. We are under no obligation to respond fast to bug reports and update the software. On the other hand the same software you download is what we use here at Leeds so we do have a vested interest in keeping it working. Also, because we haven't sold out to a commercial concern the people who designed and wrote the software and are therefore intimately familiar with its workings are still the same people who work on improving and refining it. You also always have the option of hiring your own staff to respond to requests for bug-fixes or functionality enhancements. The team that writes the software, manages the server and supports staff at Leeds consists of the equivalent of four full time employees. How many employees do you have running your student information database?

Change Your Mind?

What if you choose to use the Bodington System and a year or two down the line you change your mind? With all VLE products this has to be a consideration and the most important issue is the ability of the VLE product to output the stuff you put into it to allow its transfer to another product. At present there are limited standards for the interchange of material in VLE products but bit by bit the IMS project is providing these standards (along with other organisations). Implementation of interoperability is patchy across VLE products but we can make the following assertions about the Bodington System that may help you to make a decision;

• Files such as web pages and documents that are uploaded to the Bodington System are catalogued by the Bodington System but are not modified or transformed in themselves. This means anything that goes in can be retrieved. A system administrator could bulk transfer material with batch commands because the uploaded files are placed into a systematic directory structure on the server and catalogued in a relational database.
• Multiple choice papers and questionnaires can be imported and exported in IMS QTI format.
• There is a continued commitment to implementing more import/export features as the IMS project publishes more interoperability specifications.