OWI Committee’s activities at CCCC in Houston

This year at CCCC in Houston, our Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing Instruction will be in the final stage of a three-year plan following the publication of our Position Statement. During the past two 4Cs, we've chosen a theme/focus for our many conference activities. Year one was Institution Matters. Year two was Faculty Matters. This year we will be focusing on Student Matters.

It's important and appropriate that we're concluding with student-focused concerns about OWI. Our committee and its members have several projects underway to help sharpen the field's understanding about the student experience in OWI so we can move the overall OWI research agenda forward. A big piece is our recently piloted survey about student OWI experiences, which I wrote about a few months ago in this space.

If you're headed to Houston and interested in OWI, we have a number of activities planned for CCCC that we welcome you to take part in:

• On Wednesday, April 6 from 9:00 am to 12:30 pm, we will be offering the half-day workshop, “Taking Action with Student Retention and Success: An OWI 'Student Matters' Workshop.”
• On Thursday, April 7 from 3:15 to 4:30, our committee will offer a panel, “CCCC Committee for Effective Practices in Online Writing: Student Matters”(I'm part of this panel).
• Friday night, we’ll be having our Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting from 6:30 to 7:30

We’ll also be having our closed committee meeting on Friday morning.

The Student Matters theme will run throughout the conference for us. All these student-focused activities and the accompanying dialogue with our colleagues should help us considerably with the next major tasks our committee faces, including revising the Position Statement.