Home » Resources » Online Trainings and Database Resources

Online Trainings and Database Resources

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for individuals and businesses to outsource their processes and jobs to a distributed workforce who can perform these tasks virtually. This could include anything from conducting simple data validation and research to more subjective tasks like survey participation, content moderation, and more. MTurk enables companies to harness the collective intelligence, skills, and insights from a global workforce to streamline business processes, augment data collection and analysis, and accelerate machine learning development. A helpful guide created by Rong Ma is here: How to Run a Study in MTurk.

NVivo Training

Complimentary NVivo webinars can be scheduled for your department, class or school this semester, showing how NVivo can assist throughout all the stages of the research process.

The NVivo webinar, Using NVivo as a Research Tool will cover how NVivo can assist with your research in the following ways

  • Transcription: New NVivo Transcription tool that can be your automated transcription assistant.Quality assessment of articles
  • Literature Review: Efficiently organize and tag literature, easily keep track of critical quotes, and track ideas across many articles
  • Coding: Code your literature, interviews, surveys, and any other data you may collect in a single, convenient location and analyze all your data for multiple articles in one NVivo project.
  • Analyzing Data: Using queries to uncover potential themes, understand words in context, and explore relationships
  • Findings: Gather together all your research findings in a single location, making it easy to link your literature and your data, and to easily find quotes to illustrate themes
  • Publish: With all your data organized and analyzed in an NVivo project, writing happens quickly and easily. Generate rich visualizations in NVivo, which can be exported and included in an article or presentation

Please contact Chris Danforth, Senior Account Director-Academic at QSR International to inquire about the next scheduled trainings. Trainings are also often offered through the Libraries.

SPINPlus Funding Database

Harness the power of SPINPlus – the funding search database available to all UMD faculty, staff and students, free of charge.  The system provides a modern full-text search which is run against the company’s proprietary database. 

Highlights include:

  • Public (government – Federal and State) and private (foundations) funding opportunities
  • Results are returned to the user in relevancy ranked format, and can be further sorted, grouped, or filtered
  • Searches/funding profiles can be saved for future use
  • Search results can be set up to send daily or weekly notification alerts
  • Basic training video tutorials are available on the site

Search Guides: 
SPINInstruction Manual 
Quick Start Guide 

Please contact Hana Kabashi in the Research Development Office for assistance or to register for the next webinar.        

Grants.gov

Grants.gov provides a common website for federal agencies to post discretionary funding opportunities and for grantees to find and apply to them. Federal funding opportunities can be searched according to keyword, agency, or funding opportunity number. Follow these directions to create a grants.gov login and link your account to the University of Maryland’s Office of Research Administration (required to for electronic submission).

UMD Limited Submission

Limited Submission opportunities are grant programs that accept only a fixed number of applications or nominations from a given institution. Potential UMD applicants compete via the Limited Submission and Seed Grant Portal for the university’s institutional nomination. Current limited submission programs will be posted in the on the portal homepage with the UMD campus deadline listed.

UMD Funding Alert is a weekly opt-in funding alert provided by UMD’s Division of Research. To subscribe, complete this form.

Consult UMD IRRoC for additional resources on securing funding for your project.

UMD I-CORPS

I-Corps is a National Science Foundation program designed to foster, grow and nurture innovation ecosystems regionally and nationally. The University of Maryland is a member of the new Mid-Atlantic I-Corps Hub as well as of the larger National Innovation Network.

 The program provides real world, hands-on training on how to successfully incorporate innovations into successful products to solve societal problems. The curriculum is based on the Lean Startup framework and provides an immersive learning experience through which researchers can better understand the market potential of an innovation.  The next monthly info session is on October 6.  The next cohort starts in January 2022 and applications are being accepted now.