I teach stats too, but had to learn the hard way. A really REALLY easy book to help run analysis and understand output is this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/SPSS-Survival-Manual-Analysis-Windows/dp/0335223664. If you're willing to pay for help, you could try contacting Dr Chris Stride (a statistician and my colleague) who runs regression courses and may offer help on a one-to-one basis: http://www.offbeat.group.shef.ac.uk/FIO/index.htm

Nvivo is really good, I've used it for transcribing interview transcripts. Depends what you want to do really. I only had 15 interviews of 1 hour each, but that was still a huge amount of text to code. The best thing about Nvivo is that everything is stored and coded in one file, so you can bring up everything you've coded to the same code immediately (no cutting and pasting in word). So the question is, is it just about cost? At my uni we can buy Nvivo for just £2 so it's not a major investment. It's also easy to learn as it works like word, and there are online tutorials to work through. See how much it costs before making the decision.