aTrain and noScribe are local, GDPR-compliant, Whisper-based transcription tools that can genuinely save hours of work in qualitative interview research. They also make methodological decisions on your behalf without telling you. If you do grounded theory, you need to know which decisions those are.
When you are a physicist doing education research, methodology feels like a bureaucratic formality standing between you and the interesting work. Everyone told me to use grounded theory instead of design thinking in my thesis. I ignored them. This is the postmortem.
ViLLA is an online portal of real classroom videos built for teacher education at the University of Cologne. The idea sounds straightforward. Getting there required filming actual lessons, building infrastructure, surviving a quasi-experiment, and eventually convincing the federal government that this was worth scaling. Some notes on how that went.