Oxford University chooses Boddington. Quote: "Despite this, we came down to two choices. Of the commercially available products we felt that BlackBoard offered the best balance between usability and functionaility. We were also very impressed by the freely available opensource product , Bodington, developed by the University Leeds. [Serious Instructional Technology]
After a quick trawl around the Bodington site, I particularly liked this:
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.
Abso-flippin-lutely. Having developed a generalised application framework for ASP which was leveraged for a class-room system, what I never liked was the pedagogy encapsulated in the software implementation. It deeply worries me about the BBC Digital Curriculum; my conversations with senior bods at the BBC some years ago implied that they would be implementing their own VLE and that this would be bound to what they considered 'best practice' - the trouble is, what is 'best practice'? (Teaching can't agree best practice for teaching reading).
From the sound of it, the BBC should be leveraging something Bodington, to enable schools to use the BBC material in the way most appropropriate to them. (The fact that schools might like to recast BBC content into their own appropriate contexts was an interesting and enlightening idea to the BBC some years ago - whether that view has carried though anywhere remains to be seen).
posted at: 9:35:52 AM 
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