DESIGN OF A COOPERATIVE EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM FOR DEVELOPING HIGHER TECHNICAL MANPOWER IN KOREA

The objectives of the study were: (1) to derive the needs for a cooperative educational system between higher education and industry, (2) to design the system for developing higher technical manpower, and (3) to examine the degree of consensus of opinions on the system design among educators, industrialists, and government officials.;Nine specific needs for a cooperative educational system were derived from society, higher education, and industry. Most of them were assessed by the three groups to be both reliable and very important. Sixteen problems were identified from the derived needs and they also were rated as reliable and very important. Six goals and seven performance requirements of the system were established by the researcher, and they were judged by the three groups to be very desirable and possibly feasible. The identified ten constraints were rated as reliable and important constraints of the performance requirements of the system. Twenty-six alternatives for the resolution of the identified problems were generated. They, as a whole, were evaluated as very desirable and possibly feasible alternatives. There were differences between groups in the amount of consensus regarding the needs, problems, and alternatives at the .05 level of significance. However, there were high degrees of relationship between the group rankings of the categories by mean and convergence scores.;The central conclusions drawn from the major findings of the study were that a cooperative educational system needs to be installed to supply a sufficient number and quality of higher technical manpower as required in Korea's highly industrialized society of the 1980s, and the system can possibly solve the higher technical manpower problems which confront higher education and industry in Korea.;A systems approach as a system design process was applied, and a Delphi technique as a group communication process was used for designing the system. Seven steps of the systems approach were established and four of them were carried out in this study with the intervention of a three-round Delphi survey. Forty-five Delphi participants were selected from the three groups--technician/engineering educators, industrialists, and government officials.