Overview of the Bodington System

Bodington System Features

It's Free

The software was produced within the University of Leeds with the intention of benefitting our students and teaching staff and not for commercial exploitation. Making the software free means that we are free to continue to develop the system with educational needs taking priority over all other considerations. We also hope that with time other academic organisations may develop new functionality that can be incorporated into the system and will benefit us and all other users.

Take a look at the software licence and you will see that there really are no strings attached. The only purpose of having a software licence is to for us to protect our good name and avoid liability if anyone has problems with the software. Once you have your hands on the software we cannot stop you continuing to use it and you can even develop your own software based on the Bodington System and sell it. If you are a commercial company you could deliver a managed service based on the Bodington System and you don't need to pay for this privilege either.

It's Easy To Use

The resources and pages in a web site powered with the Bodington System exist in a tree shaped structure just like folders and files on a disk filing system but to make navigation easy some of the "folders" use the metaphor of a building, a floor or a room. That means you can tell someone where to find a resource in plain English instead of with its web address. Unlike some virtual learning environments, tools such as communication rooms, questionnaires etc. exist as objects within this tree structure so when you enter a questionnaire, for example you get simple menus of commands and options that relate specifically to the questionnaire, uncluttered by text that relates to other tools in the vicinity. A clear navigational bar allows you to jump out of the current tool easily.

The Bodington System avoids complex configuration pages with this object-oriented approach. You enter the item you wish to work with and within that item the management pages list only options relevant to that type of item.

It's Flexible

VLE software products often dictate the structure of a course area. You get check boxes to switch on and off various features but you can't rearrange and group tools according to your own specific needs. This kind of inflexible approach may work with the average user's needs but doesn't work in all situations. For example, if you want discussion facilities and resources that are not part of a course, e.g. materials to support your staff/student committee, if you have different versions of course modules that have some features in common but have differing syllabus or assessment methods or if you have a course with out-of-the-ordinary needs you may find that conventional VLE software doesn't meet your needs, or that you will have to use awkward workarounds.

Worse still commercial VLE software often has small but irritating features that you are powerless to change. For example, forms and buttons may use a form of language that is not appropriate for your part of the world or may use terminology from another country. With the commercial products you may have no power to change these things. With the Bodington System there are ways to change everything about the way it appears and the way it works. Changing icons and illustrations can be done simply by replacing the graphics files in the templates folder. Changing instructional text on the forms and pages is similarly easy since they exist as ordinary HTML files in the templates folder.

Fragments of text that are inserted into the templates interactively are generated by software at runtime so changing these involves some work with the software itself but we provide all the source code and the licence permits you to modify it in any way you see fit. (We wouldn't like to underestimate the expertise you need to rewrite the software but hiring someone to do this kind of thing would be a lot cheaper than paying for the kind of commercial VLE that would allow the same flexibility.)

It's Accessible

Legislation in the USA, the UK and many other countries requires that all students, regardless of any disability they may have, must be given an equal standard of educational provision. That means that if accessing a VLE is an integral part of your course, then your VLE must be accessible to everyone. For an average university the most common disabilities are likely to be dyslexia, impairment of vision, impairment of hearing, blindness and disabilities that affect the students' ability to operate a mouse and keyboard. Typically, dyslexia is the most common disability among university students.

The Bodington System tries as far as possible to adhere to the w3 organisation's recommendations. These recommendations are mostly aimed at avoiding bad use of HTML that might defeat assistive technologies such as audible web browsers. However, this doesn't go all the way to making the web pages accessible. To help dyslexic and visually impaired users in particular, the Bodington System can provide users with a list of style sheets. The system records each user's selected style sheet and will automatically apply it when that user logs in. This means that the web site can be displayed in high contrast colours, low contrast colours, big text, small text etc. as appropriate for the user. The system administrator can extend the number of style sheets available by dropping new style sheet files into the templates folder. (Style sheets must conform to the w3org cascading style sheet standard.) Many interactive elements within the web pages are marked up with class names and that means a custom style sheet has fine grained control over the appearance of the pages down to individual parts of a particular tool.

Our experience is that developing usability for the average user often has the spin off of providing a more accessible user interface for disabled users and that making improvements in accessibility for disabled users also improves usability for everyone. For example, the hierarchical, object oriented navigation was originally conceived as something that would reduce screen clutter and improve ease of use but it is also better for blind users because it ensures that pages contain only text that is relevant to the job in hand and that is easier to use with audible browser technology. Because it was discovered that audible browsers often have keystrokes for jumping from heading to heading in a page we added the ability to insert headings into long lists of resources and although originally aimed at benefitting blind users this has benefitted everyone.

We have gone beyond slavishly following the recommendations for accessibility and have investigated some of the issues behind these recommendations. If you are planning to study the accessibility of VLEs with disabled users we would be very interested in contributing to the study and even more interested in looking at your findings.

It Supports International Text

Text in the Bodington System is processed and stored using the Unicode system. That means that anywhere you see a web form with text input you can enter text using glyphs from any modern language, some ancient languages and a number of symbol sets such as international phonetic association symbols. That means you can support the teaching of languages and can support non-native English speaking students. At present text generated by the software itself is only available in English but if you would like to help develop a fully internationalised version of the Bodington System we'd like to hear from you.

It's Extensible

The Bodington System is an application server. That means that it provides services for storing and querying data in a database, systems for managing users, systems for controlling access to resources etc. and a programer can take advantage of this underlying functionality to 'plug in' additional code that can achieve a lot of functionality with the minimum of programming. We are currently developing a programmer's tutorial.

A Single Server Can Be Shared

A single installation of the Bodington System can be divided into a number of administrative zones. The administrators of an administrative zone can create user names and passwords, manage group membership etc. in isolation from the other administrative zones. This functionality was used to create a web site for shared use by a group of colleges in Yorkshire. It means that the individual colleges or schools can be given a more economic solution while maintaining their privacy and control. If they want, managers of one administrative zone can give access to specific resources to specific users from other administrative zones and this enables collaborative use of the web site.

It's Pedagogically Neutral

Most VLE products have at their heart an entity that they call a course and within that there are a number of tools that you can switch on or off. By trying to encapsulate the concept of a "course" within a software product they often lock you into the way of teaching they had in mind when they wrote the software. The Bodington System is different: it gives you buildings, floors, and rooms to allow you to structure your material the way that most fits the structure of your courses and it gives you tools such as discussion rooms, questionnaires, web documents, multiple choice papers etc. which you can arrange in any way you like. After about four years of use in the University of Leeds we see a wide diversity of teaching methods being supported via the same software tool. For example if it's appropriate you can publish your lecture notes as a set of pages in a reading room but if you want students to interact with you and the lecture notes you could create a discussion room instead and publish them as attachments to a series of messages you post throughout the course. You could even upload material into a multiple choice paper and use them in the feedback notes for the paper.

Next Section: Why Choose the Bodington System for Your VLE?