Speakers
Nashwa Ismail
Imperial College London, UKStart
End
Using NVivo to Build and Link Literature Reviews: A Hands-on TEL Workshop
📅 Thursday 21/05 16:00-19:00h
📍 Workshop Space B
🔎 Needs Analysis
PhD students and researchers frequently work with large, diverse, and interdisciplinary bodies of literature. Many struggle to organise this volume of reading, maintain conceptual coherence across studies, and move beyond descriptive summaries towards systematic, transparent synthesis. These challenges are intensified in TEL research, where methods, theories, and contexts often overlap and evolve rapidly.
This workshop responds to a clear need for practical, methodological support in managing and analysing literature using digital tools. NVivo is widely used in qualitative research, yet many PhD candidates are unaware of how it can support the entire literature review process, not just data analysis. The workshop demonstrates how NVivo can function as a TEL-relevant research technology that synthesis and link literature reviews.
📒 Session Description
This 4-hour workshop is a hands-on, interactive session that guides participants through a complete NVivo workflow for conducting a literature review in TEL and related fields. The workshop combines short demonstrations, guided practice, individual work, and group discussion.
The session begins with a brief discussion of common literature review challenges, such as managing large volumes of reading, tracking themes across studies, and moving from reading to synthesis. Participants will then work step by step with NVivo, using a shared set of sample articles (and optionally their own literature).
Activities include importing and organising PDFs, annotating texts, creating and refining codes for topics, concepts, theories, and methods, and writing analytic memos. Participants will use queries and visualisations to compare themes across studies and explore patterns in the literature. Short reflective discussions will focus on how these outputs support transparent and auditable synthesis.
💡 Learning Objectives
By the end of the workshop, you will be able to:
- Understand how NVivo supports the full literature review process, from reading and annotation to synthesis
- Organise and manage large bodies of literature using digital qualitative analysis tools
- Import, annotate, and code literature using concepts, theories, and methods as analytic lenses
- Apply NVivo workflows in ways that are transferable to similar qualitative analysis software (e.g. ATLAS.ti and other CAQDAS tools)
- Compare themes across studies using queries and visualisations to support systematic synthesis
- Create transparent and auditable links between sources, codes, and emerging arguments and visualising the linkage between them
- Critically reflect on how different qualitative software tools shape analytic decisions in TEL research
🧩 Pre-activities and prerequisites
Before the workshop, participants will receive a short preparation pack including:
- An overview of the workshop structure and NVivo workflow
- A small set of sample journal articles (PDFs) for hands-on practice
- Clear guidance on accessing NVivo, including information about the free 2-week trial version
As an optional pre-activity, participants will be encouraged to bring 2–3 articles related to their PhD topic and to reflect briefly on common challenges they face in their literature review, such as organising themes or moving from reading to synthesis.
No prior experience with NVivo or other qualitative analysis software is required. The workshop is suitable for PhD candidates at different stages.
Participants should bring a laptop. Installing NVivo in advance is recommended, and those without institutional access can use the 2-week free NVivo trial. Basic familiarity with academic reading and literature reviewing is assumed. Internet access will be helpful.