Teaching Professionals' Experiences of Attending Academic Conferences

Attending a conference is a professionally gratifying experience. In addition to socializing with colleagues from other institutions and a trip to a possibly interesting locale, the two main reasons to attend a conference are to hear presentations and to converse with other researchers. The researchers can know about the future research trends from the invited talks and keynote addresses. For some universities it is a must to publish papers in conferences. There are countless great reasons to attend a conference. This research explores the university teachers' views on experiences of attending conferences. Evidence of what exactly those benefits are, though, scarce, and this research reports a study seeking to identify, from own perspectives, the impact that attending conferences has. Overall, the evidence presented here is positive, highlighting a range of benefits that representatives report because of conferences. Ways in which the impact of attending conferences can be even further improved are also identified and discussed in this research.