Attending EDM’14 conference was a great opportunity for me to meet with scholars in my new research domain. Educational Data Mining is a growing multidisciplinary field of research, and there is almost no faculty member who works on this domain at my home university. Hence, meeting, networking and consulting with top-notch EDM researchers (my mentor, program chairs and other scholars) had a great impact on broadening and representing my knowledge about my research. In addition, tutorials and workshops on the first day of conference helped me a lot to find out useful tools and algorithms in Educational Data Mining for my future research projects.

My research is about a virtual learning environment (TeachLivE) for novice teachers. At the conference, I discussed several challenges about my research with different people, and they patiently helped me to resolve most of them. In summary, attending this conference helped me to find excellent shortcuts in my way toward completing PhD. This could happen because of kind support of ACM-W for my travel.