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Background: The contemporary treatment of oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) is an area of debate. We report outcomes of a minimally invasive approach involving transoral laser microsurgery (TLM). Methods: A consecutive series of patients (n = 153) undergoing primary TLM for oropharyngeal SCC from 2006 to 2013 was studied. Human papillomavirus (HPV) status was determined by p16 immunohistochemistry and high-risk HPV DNA in situ hybridization. Survival analyses were evaluated using Kaplan–Meier statistics. Results: Tumor subsites included tonsil (n = 94; 61.5%), tongue base (n = 38; 24.8%), and soft palate (n = 21; 13.7%), with the majority being American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) stage III/IVa (n = 124; 81.0%) and HPV-positive (n = 101; 66.0%). Three-year overall survival (OS), disease-specific survival (DSS), and disease-free survival (DFS) were 84.5%, 91.7%, and 78.2%, respectively. HPV-positivity portended favorable oncologic outcomes. One-year gastrostomy tube (G-tube) dependency was 1.3%. Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest single-center TLM oropharyngeal SCC series to date. Our data suggest that TLM +/− postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) results in at least as good oncologic outcomes as chemoradiotherapy (CRT), while conferring swallowing function advantages. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Head Neck, 2016 © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Head Neck 38:1263–1270, 2016.

© 2012, Australian Computer Society, Inc. This paper describes a classification scheme that can be used to investigate the characteristics of introductory programming examinations. The scheme itself is described and its categories explained. We describe in detail the process of determining the level of agreement among classifiers, that is, the inter-rater reliability of the scheme, and we report the results of applying the classification scheme to 20 introductory programming examinations. We find that introductory programming examinations vary greatly in the coverage of topics, question styles, skill required to answer questions and the level of difficulty of questions. This study is part of a project that aims to investigate the nature and composition of formal examination instruments used in the summative assessment of introductory programming students, and the pedagogical intentions of the educators who construct these instruments.

© 2012, Australian Computer Society, Inc. The ICT degrees in most Australian universities have a sequence of up to three programming subjects, or units. BABELnot is an ALTC-funded project that will document the academic standards associated with those three subjects in the six participating universities and, if possible, at other universities. This will necessitate the development of a rich framework for describing the learning goals associated with programming. It will also be necessary to benchmark exam questions that are mapped onto this framework. As part of the project, workshops are planned for ACE 2012, ICER 2012 and ACE 2013, to elicit feedback from the broader Australasian computing education community, and to disseminate the project's findings. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the project to that broader Australasian computing education community and to invite their active participation.

An online survey of recent ICT graduates in the workplace was carried out as part of a recent project funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council. The survey was concerned with the ICT curriculum in relation to workplace job requirements and university preparation for these requirements. The survey contained quantitative and qualitative components and findings from the former have been published (Koppi et al., 2009). This paper reports on a quantitative comparison of responses from graduates who had workplace experience and those who did not, and a qualitative analysis of text responses from all ICT graduates to open-ended questions concerning the curriculum and their perceived university preparation for the workplace. The overwhelming response from ICT graduates in the workplace was for more industryrelated learning. These industry relationships included industry involvement, workplace learning and business experience, up-to-date teaching and technologies, practical applications, and real-world activities. A closer relationship of academia and industry was strongly advocated by ICT graduates in the workplace. © 2010, Australian Computer Society, Inc.

A national Discipline-Based Initiative (DBI) project for Information and Communications Technology (ICT), funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, has sought the opinions of recent graduates of ICT in the workplace to help inform the curriculum. An online survey was devised to question graduates on workplace requirements and university preparation for abilities categorized as: personal/interpersonal; cognitive; business and technical. The graduates in employment have highlighted broad mismatches between the requirements of their professional work in these categories and the preparation for employment they received from university. A regression analysis was used to determine influences on graduates' opinions of the preparation they received at university. The quantitative and qualitative results from this survey could have far-reaching consequences for ICT education and this initiative will enable the development of curricula that ensures graduates are equipped with the skills required by the ICT industry. © 2009, Australian Computer Society, Inc.

Past papers of the BRACElet project have described an approach to teaching and assessing students where the students are presented with short pieces of code, and are instructed to explain, in plain English, what the code does. The student responses to these types of questions can be analysed according to the SOLO taxonomy. Some students display an understanding of the code as a single, functional whole, while other students cannot âsee the forest for the treesâ . However, classifying student responses into the taxonomy is not always straightforward. This paper analyses the reliability of the SOLO taxonomy as a means of categorising student responses. The paper derives an augmented set of SOLO categories for application to the programming domain, and proposes a set of guidelines for researchers to use.

The 157 computing education papers from the past eight NACCQ conferences are categorised and summarised by a group of researchers from multiple institutions, with steps taken to measure and improve the consistency of classification. The papers are set predominantly in programming subjects, hardware/architecture/systems/ network subjects, and capstone projects. The bulk of the papers are about teaching/learning techniques, assessment techniques, teaching/learning tools, curriculum, and educational technology. Most of the papers are set within single subjects, a few in multiple subjects within a single program or department, and fewer still in a range of subjects across the whole institution or multiple institutions. Nearly a quarter of the papers either expound a position or outline a proposal; a large but diminishing proportion report on something such as a change of curriculum or approach; and a large and increasing proportion are clearly research papers, focusing on the analysis of data to answer an explicit research question.