Beaverton School District Parent Teacher Conferences (Interpretation Request Optimization)

In the 2008-2009 school year, Beaverton School District (BSD) has 52 Schools sites, including option schools, serving close to 38,000 students with 91 different identified languages. Each year Beaverton Schools holds fall and spring Parent Teacher Conferences. Beaverton’s electric Student Information System (eSIS) records 3000 plus parents who have self-identified as non- English speaker who require interpretation during educational conferences. Parent Teacher Conferences (PTC) is education meetings between teacher and individual students and their parents to discuss the student’s education goals and current education status. It normally include teacher going through student report cards and homework with parent, also working with student and their parent to set short and long term learning goals, such as optional program, graduation requirement or even carries college major choices. PTCs not only help keep students on track, they also help to build a bridge between schools and the home

Global Virtual Teams

Today’s world thrives on globalization and no corporations can escape from it. The business environment is expanding into various geographical locations and into various functional backgrounds. It is becoming more and more difficult to manage these vast geographical diverse teams effectively. Individuals from different backgrounds, work ethics, cultures, languages, parts have to promote themselves into the new markets. They come from diverse functional areas and they find themselves interacting with someone from the other part of the globe. This report is focused on exploring the key elements that play role in global teams. Specifically we intend to discuss about the various technologies used for communications, trust and conflicts in the global virtual team. The intention of this paper is to point out the challenges faced by virtual teams and organizations in managing the technology and conflicts

How to Market ETM for Prospective Students

This paper proposes a hierarchical decision model to identify the impact of the key decisions that influence a student to choose Engineering and Technology Management at PSU. As part of the overall methodology, criteria for choosing ETM are first identified through a preliminary survey. The criteria and their alternatives are compared to each other using pair-wise comparisons. This paper highlights the importance of the hierarchical decision model using pair-wise comparisons and shows its importance as a decisionmaking tool. The paper makes recommendations on some of the strategic decisions needed to be taken by Management in areas like enrollment, curriculum, etc for attracting more students to join the ETM Program at PSU

How Large or VirtualizedTeams Affect AgileProcesses

The paper demonstrates the trend taking place in the software industry of organizations adopting agile processes while compensating for virtualized teams. Through research, we discovered that success in agile methodology is heavily based on face-to-face communication with small functional teams that are collocated—bigger non-collocation teams provided diminishing returns on agile philosophy. In other words, the bigger the team and the further apart you are, the more you need to start documenting and more documentation means less agile