We’re pleased to announce that UTTC has released the online Course Analysis, Review, and Alignment (CARAT) tool as open source at Source Forge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/carat/
The instructional design of each new UT TeleCampus-funded course is evaluated by UTTC Course Development staff early in the development process using the CARAT tool, which is based on a UTTC-designed rubric. This tool was formerly known as “cQual.”
CARAT employs a course evaluation rubric that is a composite of evaluation metrics from the SACS Principles of Good Practice, from California State University Chico’s seminal work, and from years of UTTC course development experience. The rubric is not dissimilar to that used by Quality Matters; in fact, the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications featured a Quality Assurance panel at its 2007 conference and featured Quality Matters and the TeleCampus as the two evaluation rubrics. UTTC uses this rubric in the evaluation of online courses to make sure that they are of the best possible quality for students.
The CARAT application has been redesigned from its original Flash AS2 movie clip based architecture to a Flex 3 / AS3 component based application. The primary reason for the redesign was targeted 508 accessibility compliance. The application graphics and branding style are fully customizable, as they are driven by easily edited external xml and css files. CARAT is ready to use out of the box using the standard UTTC rubric for course evaluation, but end users interested in employing a custom evaluation rubric will find that the rubric is xml driven and can be readily updated to customize the evaluation for user-defined implementations; further, css allows you to easily change the colors and logo to reflect your organization and make CARAT your own.
Credits
The original cQual application was done by Ross Henderson and Jeremy Gordon. The redesign of the application to a fully customizable, object oriented component based Flex /AS3 application was done by Brad Shaevel.
