The Issue of Privacy

Both student exercises required privacy: in the case of the medical students it was needed, for instance, to protect patient confidentiality; with the Chemistry feedback, it was necessary to allow honest appraisal of the teaching etc.

Pebble and other blog hosting services provide some means of restricting access, but this generally assumes that users are accessing the service directly through the Web interface and not via a third-party system. Yet, perhaps the key benefit of the Bodington VLE is that it can restrict access to selected groups of users that reflect the institutional hierarchy.

Especially useful are the access control mechanisms, available for each resource, which can be anything such as a general container, questionnaire, or discussion area. In all these cases, access can be set for any number of groups via an interface like the following example taken from Oxford's deployment: