comments

I think the material I learned will be very helpful. Actually, that afternoon I had friend in my department ask about transcribing programs and I was able to tell her about express scribe and trancenda (I think that's what the video transcribing program is called). So I already see the materials value. I think one suggestion would be to add more content. For example, compress the first 4 weeks into 2 or 3 weeks and then spend more time on the data mining programs. Also, even though all of them aren't free, it would be good to include programs you have to pay for like NVivo. That's by biggest suggestion- spend more time on the data analysis tools and combine the first few weeks into fewer classes.

QDA Miner. Recently, I've had to learn about QDA Minder for a research project the quarter. First, it's good to know this program goes beyond simply statistical analysis of text. My interaction with QDA Minder has been slightly frustrating. I've found it difficult to use the document converstion wizard. When I've tried to import fies, I've gotten error messages. However, this may be a problem with Symstat and not with QDA Minder, which I believe is the program for running statistics on documents. I will also add that the directiosn included in the program are not the best I've ever seen. The directions make things seem simple and they often skip simple steps. For example, I was tring to create a dictionary to run an analysis, but I couldn't figure out how to move words into the dictonary. Although there were directions, it skipped a simple step in the process that would have saved me around 20 minutes of my time. Overall, I think that if you spend some time with the program or find someone who knows the program it could be an especially useful tool, especially with the potential to do both quanitative and qualitative analyses.