Hello readers,
You may have noticed from the “home” page that I will be offering online MAXQDA training workshops next month. I also plan on scheduling regular online MAXQDA workshops afterwards. I mostly don’t do it for the money and it is a ton of work organizing distance education courses like this to an international audience from anywhere in the world. However, I really feel the need to do this. Here’s why …
Last week, I was invited to teach an NVivo training session for a large research institute in my hometown. About two-thirds of the participants used Windows and one-third used Mac computers. We kept running into troubles because of the very different interfaces of the two versions and the lack of capacity to coordinate work in a team that had both Windows and Mac users! It could easily take one full work week (i.e., 35 hours) to simply set up the projects so that all teammates can actually begin to analyze the data. And this was the newest version NVivo 11 released a short while ago!
Now, let’s take a look at MAXQDA, the latest version 12 (released Sept, 2015) offers identical interfaces, identical functions and seamless transferability of files between Windows and Mac formats. Can you imagine how much less time is wasted on setting up the projects and dealing with unnecessary problems between different platforms?
The saddest part is, institutions all over the world from world-class universities to small colleges have purchased very expensive (I mean very, very expensive) site licences for NVivo for its members. Essentially, this is forcing people to use NVivo because it is free, regardless of its functionality and inability to deliver on useful new upgrades.
One thing MAXQDA (and other software companies) don’t do as well compared to NVivo is … guess what … marketing! I often wonder how people could say things like, “NVivo is the best qualitative data analysis tool available” when all they know is this one thing.
This is why out of my very full research schedule, I am still offering online MAXQDA workshops. I want researchers to have an option. I want users to know that there is something more intuitive and user-friendly that creates less project management headaches out there on the market. I also want the librarians or project managers at various universities (who likely don’t conduct research themselves) who decide on what software to pay a hefty site license fee for to know that there is more than one FOR-PROFIT TOOL from a PRIVATE COMPANY for qualitative data analysis out there.
You may have noticed from the “home” page that I will be offering online MAXQDA training workshops next month. I also plan on scheduling regular online MAXQDA workshops afterwards. I mostly don’t do it for the money and it is a ton of work organizing distance education courses like this to an international audience from anywhere in the world. However, I really feel the need to do this. Here’s why …
Last week, I was invited to teach an NVivo training session for a large research institute in my hometown. About two-thirds of the participants used Windows and one-third used Mac computers. We kept running into troubles because of the very different interfaces of the two versions and the lack of capacity to coordinate work in a team that had both Windows and Mac users! It could easily take one full work week (i.e., 35 hours) to simply set up the projects so that all teammates can actually begin to analyze the data. And this was the newest version NVivo 11 released a short while ago!
Now, let’s take a look at MAXQDA, the latest version 12 (released Sept, 2015) offers identical interfaces, identical functions and seamless transferability of files between Windows and Mac formats. Can you imagine how much less time is wasted on setting up the projects and dealing with unnecessary problems between different platforms?
The saddest part is, institutions all over the world from world-class universities to small colleges have purchased very expensive (I mean very, very expensive) site licences for NVivo for its members. Essentially, this is forcing people to use NVivo because it is free, regardless of its functionality and inability to deliver on useful new upgrades.
One thing MAXQDA (and other software companies) don’t do as well compared to NVivo is … guess what … marketing! I often wonder how people could say things like, “NVivo is the best qualitative data analysis tool available” when all they know is this one thing.
This is why out of my very full research schedule, I am still offering online MAXQDA workshops. I want researchers to have an option. I want users to know that there is something more intuitive and user-friendly that creates less project management headaches out there on the market. I also want the librarians or project managers at various universities (who likely don’t conduct research themselves) who decide on what software to pay a hefty site license fee for to know that there is more than one FOR-PROFIT TOOL from a PRIVATE COMPANY for qualitative data analysis out there.
