Training

CAQDAS Workshop

The CAQDAS Networking Project is offering a one-day Transana Introductory Workshop on March 14, 2012 at the University of Surrey in England. The workshop will be presented by Christina Silver, Ph.D. See their web site for details.

Training Workshops by David Woods, Transana's Developer

Training workshops typically run two days. In our experience, one day is not sufficient to cover Transana adequately, while two days allows for ample practice of all basic skills and an introduction to more advanced topics.

In a typical training session, we cover the following topics:

• An Introduction to Transana
  
  
• Transcription as an analytic act
  
  
• Identifying and selecting analytically interesting video segments
  
  
• Manipulating analytic collections
  
  
• Keywords and coding
  
  
• Making sense of coded data : reports, maps, and graphs
  
  
• Searching, data-mining, and hypothesis-testing
  
  
• Multiple simultaneous transcripts, multiple simultaneous media files, multiple simultaneous users, and other advanced topics
  
  
• Using Transana for presentations and case development
  
  
• Collecting video data, and the manipulation of video for use in Transana.
  

We generally assume that training participants are familiar with qualitative methodologies prior to the beginning of training. Familiarity with Transana is not required.

Upcoming Training Workshops

The training workshops we conducts are highly interactive and provide ample opportunity for hands-on practice. It is therefore essential that each participant have a computer during the workshop. We will provide a training data set, although we also encourage participants to bring their own video or audio files, in a Transana-friendly format, to work on.

Please contact David if you'd like to host a Transana Training Workshop, either privately or open to the public. If you would like to open your session to the broader Transana community, I will be happy to post information about it on this page, as well as sending an e-mail to the Transana mailing list.

Is a one-day workshop possible?

I haven't offered a single-day workshop in many years. My feeling is that there is too much to learn, and it's of sufficient complexity that a single day would not really be adequate.

However, in the spirit of data-driven decision-making, I put the question of whether it could be done to the participants in a recent two-day workshop class.  One participant noted that a one-day workshop would be "more convenient," but the majority of the comments were not favorable:

Hmmm… I don’t think that it can be adequately taught/learned in a single day. 

There is very good support in the tutorial and online, so perhaps it would not be a disaster to give a whirlwind tour and just make sure that everyone knows where to get the real practice.

I think the workshop requires at least two days.  ...  In fact, I would have liked a 3rd day to work with my own data.

"Perhaps it would not be a disaster" doesn't exactly instill me with confidence in the one-day option. 

If your group is accomplished in manipulating media files, putting data into Transana, and transcribing, I might consider a one-day "analysis-only" workshop for non-beginners. Otherwise, I consider the concept of a one-day Transana training workshop to be penny-wise but pound-foolish.

Official Transana Trainers

David Woods, Ph.D.
David is Transana's Lead Developer. He is a Researcher at the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in the USA. He's provided Transana workshops all over the world ranging from two to five days in length.

Paul Dempster, Ph.D.
Paul Dempster is currently a Research Fellow at the Leeds Institute of Health Sciences at the University of Leeds in the UK. He has conducted Transana Training Workshops with international audiences, and provides methological consultation regarding new features for Transana.

Hayley Barnes
Hayley is an accomplished Transana user, currently working with the Center for Assessment and Evaluation at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, while working on her Ph.D. in Education.