One of the great challenges facing the South African economy is to increase the number and variety of viable and sustainable economic enterprises. We have a history that has brought about many interruptions in the development of enterprises in particular. This has been particularly associated with our racial history and the destruction of wealth in black hands in both the rural and urban areas. It has adverse effects on income distribution, entrepreneurship and employment creation. The recent history of South Africa cannot ignore the role of cooperatives in developing its economic foundation. Cooperatives in the financial, service and agricultural sectors were backbones of the apartheid economy, hence we see the cooperative idea resonates on numerous platforms in the democratic Government as part of its empowerment discourse and addressing the national objective of economic growth, poverty and unemployment reduction. A number of studies have identified that the culture of entrepreneurship is one of the prerequisites for the prosperity and the high rate of economic development registered by most of the developed countries. However in terms of South Africa, the low level of entrepreneurship activity compared to its peers has been identified as one of the key factors responsible for the low rate of economic growth experienced by South Africa over the past 10 years, and cooperatives as model can be a solution to foster entrepreneurial culture and as a result maximise economic growth, reduce poverty and unemployment. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2012.

This study focuses on the compilation of guidelines for the implementation of cooperative education in teaching and learning organisations, in the Gauteng region in South Africa. Since no or limited guidelines exist in cooperative education in such organisations, it was intended to determine the present position or status of cooperative education in such organisations with the concomitant development of a conceptual framework and guidelines that could act as directive in higher education institutions and industry, with regard to cooperative education. At first a literature review was undertaken on the basic principles and nature of cooperative education, with an analysis of the current status of cooperative education locally and abroad. Special emphasis was placed during the literature survey on one of the components of cooperative education, namely experiential learning, with its different forms of learning such as work-integrated learning and service learning. Traditionally, higher education institutions in South Africa, and especially universities of technology and comprehensive universities, used a variety of terminology to describe the principles and practice of cooperative education. This created much confusion among academics in these institutions. A need for the standardisation of such terminology was identified and an attempt was made to redefine the concept of cooperative education and related terminology, to clarify this matter by defining cooperative education and related terminology. Furthermore, a comparative literature survey was undertaken with regard to the best practices in cooperative education on a national and international level. One of the most important issues in higher education since the origin and implementation of cooperative education is the strategic management of cooperative education. The various roles and responsibilities of the relevant role players involved in cooperative education were researched and recorded from literature. In consideration of the literature and on completion of the empirical study, an integrated (eclectic) management structure for the management and administration of cooperative education was proposed and described for higher education institutions. Funding of experiential learning in higher education institutions in South Africa by the Department of Education (DOE) is presently a serious concern. Without the proper funding of the experiential learning endeavour, it would be rendered null and void. Literature, according to a survey by the Committee of Technikon Principals (CTP) in former technikons, among others, indicated that funds from the DOE allocated in the form of subsidy and earmarked for experiential learning were not used for its intended purpose, and that such institutions did not deliver satisfactorily with regard to experiential learning. The consequence was that government subsidy for experiential learning in universities of technologies (the former technikons) was ceased, with serious implications for its implementation on operational level. Literature revealed that similar experiences were encountered historically in the United States of America (USA). Many challenges have been identified in the literature on cooperative education, such as the initiation of new strategies and the need to promote research and development in cooperative education. Future perspectives indicated a confirmation for the need for innovation and continuous improvement for cooperative education, locally and abroad. Finally, the literature review confirmed that cooperative education locally and abroad creates the "cutting edge" for higher education institutions. An empirical study involved students, heads of academic departments in higher education institutions and supervisors in industry, to ascertain the current status with regard to the basic principles and nature of cooperative education as well as best practices in cooperative education. Thereafter, a conceptual framework with concomitant guidelines was developed and compiled for cooperative education for teaching and learning organisations. Supported by a literature survey which highlighted the importance of quality assurance of experiential learning as one of the components of cooperative education, a quality assurance conceptual framework to be used in the quality management of experiential learning for learning programmes in higher education institutions was described. Finally, various recommendations and guidelines have been proposed for the implementation of cooperative education in teaching and learning organisations in the Gauteng province in South Africa. Keywords for indexing: cooperative education, work-based learning, work-integrated learning, experiential learning, experiential training, in-service training, placement of learners in industry, preparation of learners for experiential learning, placement of learners, monitoring/mentoring of learners, assessment of learners, debriefing of learners, research in cooperative education, management information systems in cooperative education, marketing of cooperative education, management models, models of cooperative education, companies in cooperative education, best practices in cooperative education, industrial liaison, partnerships with industry, training of learners in industry, nationally and internationally exchange/placement of learners, quality management, skills development and literacy development, learnership and skills programmes. / Thesis (Ph.D. (Education))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

Graduation date: 1971

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 53-55). / ii, 55 leaves, bound ill. (some col.) 29 cm

A performance evaluation of CSTC (Cooperative Space Time Coding) with spatially cor-related fading and imperfect channel estimation in Gaussian as well as impulsive noise is presented. Closed form expressions for the pairwise error probability conditioned on the estimated channel gains are derived by assuming the components of the received vector are independent given the estimated channel gains. An expurgated union bound using the limiting before averaging technique given the estimated channel gains is then obtained. Although this assumption is not strictly valid, simulation results show that the bound is accurate in estimating the diversity order as long the channel estimation is not very poor. It is found that CSTC with block fading channels can reduce the frame error rate (FER) relative to SUSTC (Single User Space Time Coding) with quasi-static fading channels, even when the channel gains for each user are strongly correlated and when the channel estimations are very poor. A decision metric for CSTC with spatially correlated fading, imperfect channel estimation, and impulsive mixture Gaussian noise is derived which yields lower FERs than the Gaussian noise decision metric. Simulation results show that the FER performance of CSTC with mixture Gaussian noise outperforms CSTC with Gaussian noise at low SNR. At high SNR, the FER performance of CSTC with Gaussian noise is better than the FER performance of CSTC with mixture Gaussian noise due to the heavy tail of the mixture Gaussian noise.

Thesis (MReg&UrbPlan)--University of South Australia, 1999

Master of Engineering (Research) / This thesis deals with the problem of cooperative explorations of a group of autonomous vehicles in unknown environments in the context of decentralized behaviour. The main contribution of this thesis is the development of a comprehensive decentralized cooperative exploration frame work in which each individual vehicle has the ability to explore an unknown environment by itself and also by cooperative behaviour in a team of several vehicles. To simulate the whole system, each individual vehicle will have the ability to explore an unknown environment by dynamically path-planning (with obstacle and collision avoidance), high-level con- trolling, updating the environment map, proposing potential destinations (frontiers), and solving online task assignment. In this thesis, the framework simulates an unknown environment as an occupancy grid map and uses a frontier-base exploration strategy, in which a cell will be marked as a frontier if it is adjacent at least one open cell, as the core architecture. In dealing with the uncertainties in process transition and observation models of autonomous vehicles, the well-known discrete extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm is investigated and implemented. When exploring the environment, a vehicle will update its surrounding information, then propose its potential destinations and evaluate the utility (benefit) to travel to each of those destinations. The benefit to go to each destination is derived from the subtraction of the utility (value) of that cell to the sum of the cost to travel to that cell and the steering cost. The key to cooperative exploration in the team of vehicles lies in each vehicle's ability to communicate the updates of the world to the whole team and to contribute to the global list of potential destinations. And each vehicle has the capability of solving the task assignment problem for the team by calling its own online-task-assignment solving engine. This algorithm results each vehicle in having a destination to visit, which benefits the whole team the most and reduces the total exploration time of the team.

This PhD thesis is concerned with the social psychology of cooperative learning and its effects in cognitive and social-emotional domains. It comprises two main studies and two exploratory studies undertaken during two 10-day, 16-hour learning intervention programmes for Maths Word Problem-Solving (MWPS), respectively for 285 and 451 Grade-5 students in Singapore. Study 1 used a quasi-experimental design to investigate the outcomes of task-structures in an Individual Learning condition and three dyadic Cooperative Learning conditions that varied in the key elements: positive interdependence, individual accountability and group goals. The results indicated that a Cooperative Learning condition with a high level of positive interdependence in combination with a low level of individual accountability resulted in significantly lower MWPS academic achievement and peer–self-concept outcomes than the other conditions; whereas the other Cooperative conditions with lower levels of positive interdependence did not differ significantly from the Individual Learning condition in MWPS academic outcomes but produced better peer–self-concept outcomes. The discussion theorises how task-structured positive interdependence in cooperative conditions can potentially be so rigid that it limits individual control in overcoming a dyadic partner’s error. In turn, this increases the likelihood that members of dyads would “sink together” (rather than “swim together”) –which appears to produce relatively worse MWPS academic outcomes as well as being detrimental to peer–self-concept outcomes. Therefore, optimal cooperative learning conditions for mathematics should allow interaction amongst student partners but not preclude individual control over any stage of the learning task. Study 2 comprised three interrelated investigations of the effects of rewarding learning behaviours and the effects of ability-structures on Individual, Equals (homogeneous) and Mixed (heterogeneous) dyads. All children were eligible to be rewarded for their own MWPS academic mastery achievements, but comparison groups in each of the ability-structures were either eligible or not eligible to be rewarded for displaying target learning behaviours (LB-Rewards or No-LB-Rewards). The academic programme was based on Polya’s problem-solving strategies of understanding the problem, devising a plan, carrying out the plan, and checking the results. Children in all learning conditions were instructed to use these problem-solving strategies and, according to their differently assigned learning conditions, to use learning behaviours (LB’s) either ‘for helping oneself’ in Individual conditions or ‘helping one’s partner’ in Equals and Mixed conditions. In “LB-Rewards” conditions, teachers rewarded the children’s displays of the assigned behaviours for learning alone or learning together, whereas in “LB-No-Rewards” conditions they did not. The investigation in Study 2a encompassed the same dependent variables as Study 1. The results indicated that for maths (MWPS), Learning Behaviour rewards were detrimental to Individual Learning conditions with significantly lower MWPS gains when the rewards were used compared to when they were not, whereas the opposite pattern was found for Equals where the effects of Learning Behaviour significantly enhanced MWPS outcomes. For peer–self-concept, effects varied across the Cooperative conditions’ Learning Behaviour rewards conditions. An exploratory analysis of High-, Low- and Medium-ability revealed patterns of the inter-relationships between ability-structures and effects of rewarding. Study 2b is exploratory and involved traversing the traditional theoretical dichotomy of individual vs social learning, to develop a measure combining them both in ‘self-efficacy for learning maths together and learning maths alone’. The effects of the various experimental conditions on factors in this measure were explored, allowing detailed insight into the complex, multi-dimensional and dynamic inter-relationships amongst all the variables. The findings have been developed into a theory of Incentive-values–Exchange in Individual- and Cooperative-learning, arguing that there are four main cooperative learning dimensions – “individual cognitive endeavour”, “companionate positive influence”, “individualistic attitudes development” and “social-emotional endeavour”. The argument is that students’ motivation to learn cooperatively is the product of perceived equalization of reward-outcomes in relation to each dyadic member’s contributions to learning-goals on these dimensions. Hence, motivation varies across ability-structures and reward-structures in a complex manner. A further proposition of the theory is that social-emotional tendencies and biases form a dynamic system that tends to maintain dyadic partners’ achievement levels relative to their ability-positioning. Study 2c is exploratory and extends Study 2b by illustrating its Incentive-values–Exchange theory. Samples of children’s written descriptive reflections of their experiences in cooperative dyads are provided to illustrate the point made about the children’s relationships and effects on each other for each of the factors on the individual- and cooperative-learning scales. As such, this section of the thesis offers a parsimonious explanation of cooperative learning and the effects of various learning conditions on the integrated cognitive, social and emotional domains. Practical implications in light of the study’s findings of optimal conditions include the possibility of practitioners more closely tailoring cooperative learning conditions to meet the academic or social-emotional needs of learners at specific ability levels. Future directions for research include testing some of the learning dimensions and proposed theoretical configurations for them using controls identified by the statistical analyses together with qualitative observations, and further developing new methodologies for investigating the social-psychological causes and consequences of learning motivation.

Thesis (M.S.)--Oregon State Agricultural College, 1931. / Typescript. Also available online.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Toronto, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-06, Section: A, page: 2345. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 300-309).