For educators and doctoral programmes

Qualitative Methods Learning and Education with Skimle

Ready-made materials for teaching qualitative methods at Masters and doctoral level. Download them, adapt them, and teach them in your own course.

Free download

Two-session methods course: AI in qualitative research

The complete materials for two sessions of 60 to 90 minutes, designed for M.Sc. and Ph.D. level courses. Session 1 is conceptual and needs no software, so it also works as a stand-alone seminar. Session 2 is hands-on and walks through the research lifecycle in Skimle. Slide decks, a minute-by-minute course plan, in-class and post-session assignments and example materials are all included.

Format
Two sessions of 60 to 90 minutes, one to two weeks apart
Level
M.Sc., Ph.D. and early-career researchers in management and organisation studies, adaptable to other social sciences
Assignments
Two in-class exercises per session, plus a post-session assignment of 3 to 5 hours. Together the two sessions support roughly 1 ECTS.

Free to use and adapt in your own teaching. Prepared in August 2026 by Henri Schildt, Professor of Strategy at Aalto University and co-founder of Skimle.

The two sessions

Session 1

Rethinking qualitative research as knowledge work

60 to 90 minutes, no software required

Can machines take part in interpretation? Participants code a passage of an interview by hand, then compare their coding with a machine coding of the same passage. The session places AI within the long tradition of expert work scaffolded by artifacts, and closes on the practical risks and on a first draft of an AI disclosure paragraph for a Methods section.

Participants will be able to

  • State what AI does well and badly in qualitative analysis, beyond both the hype and the dismissal.
  • Compare their own coding of an interview passage with a machine coding of the same passage.
  • Judge when the scale of a corpus makes AI coding sufficient for the research design at hand.
  • Name the five practical risks, from confidentiality to methodological opacity, and the response to each.
  • Draft a defensible AI disclosure paragraph for a Methods section.

Session 2

Using AI throughout your qualitative study

60 to 90 minutes, laptops and Skimle accounts

The qualitative research lifecycle stage by stage, practised hands-on in Skimle on a built-in demo dataset: design, data generation, familiarisation, theorising and reporting. Participants generate and verify document metadata, compare descriptive coding with theory-driven coding, and rebuild a category structure around a theoretical argument.

Participants will be able to

  • Locate AI-supported tasks within the five stages of the qualitative research lifecycle.
  • Generate document metadata, verify it, and use it to organise informants and structure comparisons.
  • Distinguish descriptive coding from theory-driven coding, and say what each is good for.
  • Redistribute existing insights into a theoretically motivated category scheme, and judge the result honestly.
  • Assemble power quotes and counter-evidence, and export quote tables for a manuscript.

What is in the pack

  • Session 1 slide deck

    Artificial intelligence in qualitative research: what AI changes, and what it does not.

  • Session 2 slide deck

    Using AI throughout your qualitative study, stage by stage.

  • Course plan

    Learning objectives, minute-by-minute timings, condensed lecture content and instructor talking points for both sessions.

  • Example interview

    The full NASA oral history interview with Neil Armstrong, plus the short excerpt used in the coding exercise.

  • Exercise materials

    The prepared AI coding of that excerpt, to reveal after participants have coded it by hand.

Fitting it to your course

1

Session 1 stands alone

It needs only a projector and a printed interview excerpt, so it also works as a single guest lecture inside an existing methods course.

2

Session 2 needs laptops

Participants work in their own Skimle project on a demo dataset that is built into the product. A trial or institutional account is enough.

3

Sized for a seminar group

The timings assume 15 to 25 participants. With a larger group, make the small groups bigger rather than cutting the exercises: the exercises carry most of the learning.

4

Everything is editable

The decks are PowerPoint files and the course plan is a Word document, so you can cut, reorder and translate them for your own students.

Teaching a course with Skimle?

Skimle supports qualitative analysis courses at Masters and doctoral level with flexible licensing, ready-made learning materials and expert support. Tell us about your course and we will help you set it up.

Academic discounts and project packs are listed on the pricing page.