Dans un rapport intitulé "Loi handicap: des avancées réelles, une application encore insuffisante", rendu public le 6 juillet, la commission sénatoriale pour le contrôle de l'application des lois dresse le bilan de la loi handicap du 11 février 2005: accessibilité, maisons départementales des personnes handicapées, scolarisation, accès à l'emploi et à la formation... Les auteurs passent en revue les progrès et les déceptions. Le principal obstacle à l'accès et au maintien dans l'emploi des personnes handicapées est leur faible niveau de qualification: 83% d'entre elles ont aujourd'hui une qualification égale ou inférieure au niveau V. Pour relever le niveau de qualification, les auteurs préconisent de sensibiliser et d'informer les jeunes sur les parcours d'études possibles et de les encourager à mener des études supérieures. Gage d'employabilité et d'autonomie pour les personnes handicapées, la formation doit faire l'objet d'efforts redoublés de la part des pouvoirs publics. Pôle emploi, Cap emploi, Direccte..., tous les acteurs de la politique d'insertion professionnelle des personnes handicapées devraient mettre en place des outils communs de suivi des parcours professionnels.
Télécharger le rapport. Rapport d'information de Claire-Lise Campion et Isabelle Debré, fait au nom de la commission pour le contrôle de l'application des lois. n° 635 (2011-2012), 4 juillet 2012, 190 p.

Les champs d'activité de l'Agefos-PME, d'Opcalia, de l'Opca PL et du Fafsea ont été complétés par arrêtés ministériels publiés au JO du 19 juillet dernier. Voir notre table actualisée des OPCA par branche.
Ainsi les entreprises de conchyliculture et de Pêches maritimes (accord du 26/5/11) relèvent de l'Agefos-PME (voir l'arrêté), les fleuristes et les entreprises de vente et service des animaux familiers devront s'adresser au Fafsea (voir l'arrêté).
Les entreprises de la branche esthétique, cosmétique et de l'enseignement lié aux métiers de l'esthétique et de la parfumerie ainsi que les banques populaires rejoignent Opcalia. Les vétérinaires salariés entrent dans le champ de l'Opca PL (voir l'arrêté).
Enfin, à noter que le Comptoir des entrepreneurs et le Crédit foncier de France sont retirés du champ de l'Unagecif récemment créé et agréé comme Opacif (voir l'arrêté). Voir notre fiche technique sur les Opacif (J 2.1) mise à jour.

Les travailleurs indépendants, les membres des professions libérales et des professions non salariées, y compris ceux n'employant aucun salarié, doivent consacrer chaque année au financement des actions de formation professionnelle continue une contribution collectée par un FAF de non salariés (Agefice, FIF PL et FAF PM).
Le montant minimum de cette contribution est désormais fixée à 0,25% du montant annuel du plafond de la sécurité sociale (au lieu de 0,15%). Elle ne peut être inférieure à 0,34% du même montant (au lieu de 0,24%), lorsque l'assujetti bénéficie du concours de son conjoint collaborateur.
Cette augmentation a été adoptée pour permettre aux 3 FAF de faire face à la hausse des demandes de prise en charge de formation. Par ailleurs, alors que la loi ne prévoyait pas les modalités d’évolution des taux de contribution, la loi de finances rectificative donne une base juridique à la majoration du montant minimal des contributions souhaitée par les trois FAF.
Un décret précisera les modalités de mise en œuvre de ces dispositions. Notre fiche technique E 3.1 est actualisée.
Loi n° 2012-958 du 16 août 2012 de finances rectificative pour 2012 (art 38).

Le 12 juillet 2011, les partenaires sociaux ont conclu un accord national interprofessionnel redéfinissant les missions de l'Association pour l'emploi des cadres (voir l'accord et notre actualité du 13/07/11). Ce accord vient d'être étendu par arrêté ministériel.
Les articles 5 et 7 sont étendus, sous réserve des dispositions du mandat de service public signé le 19 mars 2012 qui limite explicitement les missions d'accompagnement à l'accompagnement personnalisé en vue de l'insertion professionnelle de jeunes issus de l'enseignement supérieur et de cadres ayant des difficultés particulières de réinsertion sur le marché du travail.
Les troisième et quatrième alinéas de l'article 16 sont exclus de l'extension comme étant contraires à la procédure prévue dans le mandat de service public en conformité avec une décision communautaire du 20 décembre 2011.
Arrêté du 31 juillet 2012.

La relance de la démocratisation de l'accès aux études supérieures pour tous et l'accompagnement  des étudiants d'origine modeste sont une priorité.
Comme l'ensemble des Français, les étudiants ont vu leur pouvoir d'achat stagner voire diminuer ces dernières années. Les politiques conduites par la droite ont aggravé leurs difficultés.
Le changement n'attend pas. Geneviève Fioraso, ministre de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche, fait de la relance de la démocratisation de l'accès aux études supérieures une priorité majeure. Elle conduit pour ce faire une politique ambitieuse pour l'accompagnement des étudiants d'origine modeste. Malgré un contexte budgétaire très tendu, cette orientation pour la justice sociale se traduit déjà dans les faits.
Alors que plusieurs pays ont fait le choix d'accroître très significativement la part du coût de scolarité financée par les étudiants, le choix politique a été de ne pas augmenter les droits annuels d'inscription mais de procéder à une actualisation au niveau de l'inflation 2011 (2,1%) soit + 4 euros en Licence, + 5 euros en Master et + 8 euros en Doctorat.
En outre, non seulement le versement des bourses sera correctement assuré, malgré l'imprévoyance du précédent gouvernement, mais les aides aux étudiants progressent de 2.1%. Et, nouveauté majeure, le gouvernement a décidé l'encadrement des loyers. La mesure portée par la ministre en charge du logement profitera à de très nombreux étudiants.
Le Président de la République a exprimé son intention d'une remise à plat des aides existantes en vue de créer une allocation d'études supérieures sous condition de ressources.
La concertation s'ouvrira prochainement, notamment au cours des Assises de l'Enseignement supérieur et de la Recherche.

By Ryan Lytle. Hybrid learning may be more prevalent in academia and industry over the next decade.
Higher education is going to look much different in the future, with a greater reliance on teleconferencing and distance learning, according to a recent survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.
Sixty percent of the 1,021 respondents, which included a variety of technology experts, education professionals, and venture capitalists, agree that hybrid learning, which combines online education with in-class instruction, and "individualized, just-in-time learning approaches" will be much more common by the year 2020.
"[T]echnology will allow for more individualized, passion-based learning by the student, greater access to master teaching, and more opportunities for students to connect to others … for enhanced learning experiences," wrote Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Communications and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, whose comments as a survey respondent were included in the report.
One major factor that will drive technological innovation in higher education over the next decade, according to survey respondents, is the steep cost of higher education. According to data provided by 1,009 colleges and universities to U.S. News, college graduates completed their degrees in 2010 with an average loan burden of $24,962, and nationwide, the student loan debt has passed $1 trillion.
[Find out if the Student Loan Forgiveness Act would help you.]
"The high and growing cost of university education cannot be sustained, particularly in the light of the growing global demand for such education," wrote Donald Barnes, a visiting professor at Guangxi University in China. "Therefore, there is already a rush to utilize the new medium of the Internet as a means of delivering higher education experience and products in more economical and efficient modes."
Some universities have approached this issue by making some of their courses more accessible to students who may not have the resources or ability to consume the content otherwise. Institutions such as Stanford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have long offered select courses for free online, and services such as Coursera and Udacity offer myriad online courses from top ranked universities ranging in subjects from computer science to medicine at no cost to the user.
[Explore options for free online education programs.]
While fully online courses are effective in reaching larger audiences, studies have shown that hybrid learning may be the most effective way to learn. Marti Hearst, a professor at the University of California—Berkeley, noted in the survey that "having students watch the video lecture or read the material at home and then work on problems … together in the classroom with other students and a teacher is a powerful model."
While higher education professionals consider the most effective tools for the future of their field, the corporate world is also at a crossroads in how it educates its employees, says Winston Binch, a partner and chief digital officer at advertising agency Deutsch LA.
"It's not just the colleges and universities that need to adapt and have more of a modern approach to their educating," Binch notes. "It's also the businesses themselves that need to get more aggressive in how they're educating their employees."
[See how students have used college to build start-ups.]
Binch says there have been ongoing discussions at Deutsch about how to use digital tools to "educate our employees from the day that they walk in." He acknowledges, though, that one of the biggest challenges his company has faced is how to incorporate education into the agency.
For academia and industry alike, the greatest challenge may actually be in creating lifelong learners out of students and professionals. With a rapidly changing marketplace, "the real need for education in the economy will be re-education," wrote Jeff Jarvis, director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism.
"As industries go through disruption and jobs are lost forever, people will need to be retrained for new roles," Jarvis noted. "Our present educational structure is not built for that, but in that I see great entrepreneurial opportunity."
[Discover companies hiring grads from your school.]
This opportunity is possible if there is communication and collaboration between educational institutions and corporations, notes David Slayden, the executive director of Boulder Digital Works at the University of Colorado—Boulder.
"Industry [leaders] realize that they need to really establish and maintain a learning culture within their companies to retain talent and attract talent," Slayden says. "But it needs to be a partnership between industry and academia, not an assembly line."
Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

By Mari Elken. In the last two years, a number of various MOOC platforms have been introduced and received a significant amount of attention in higher education news outlets. The big “bomb” arrived in the end of 2011 when Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced that they would start broadcasting a portion of its courses for free, openly on the internet – the MITx initiative. By now, the MITx has led to the development of edX that includes courses from MIT, Harvard and UC Berkeley.
In April 2012, the big buzz word was the Udacity initiative led by Sebathian Thrun and now the newest MOOC initiative is Coursera, which is based on courses from a number of universities from US and Europe. In addition, there are providers such as Khan Academy, Minerva and others.
The fact that edX and Coursera also offer courses that are produced by specific and highly recognized universities further provides some sort of quality assurance stamp to these initiatives. Coursera has requirements about high quality courses written into the contract with the particular university – albeit in a very general manner. However, one could argue that in a context where these courses are available for scrutiny by all universities have a strong incentive to have strong internal quality assurance routines.
Nevertheless, questions are being raised whether there is anything different with the ideas of MOOCs that has not been already there through distance learning initiatives that many universities have held for decades. While the ideas of having open courses available online is not new, the scale of the students entering MOOCs definitely seems to set them apart from earlier initiatives and the development of technology provides a massive increase in accessibility. Udacity now has over 112 000 students and MITx first course attracted over 150 000 students. However, one of the big issues for MOOCs this far is that while they can boast with enormous enrolments rates, the actual graduation rates are extremely low. For instance, of the 150 000 that signed up for the MITx course, only just above 7000 actually completed the course, indicating a graduation rate of ca 5%.
There is a claim that MOOCs are in fact not just redistribution of classes already available, but that there is a specific pedagogical thinking behind the course structure. However, this is largely questioned, for instance by Dan Butin in the eElearn magazine who argued that this is a fundamental problem of such courses, according to him they promote an old-fashioned pedagogy and do not put the student in the centre of learning, and as such “the only transformation will be that students online will fall asleep from boredom much faster than those sitting in the cramped lecture-hall seats“.
In April, when Udacity was the hot topic, Hedda associate Shane Colvin also argued that the idea is not necessarily very new, when comparing it to other online course platforms (such as iTunes U and Lynda) that have been around for some time. He further questioned the actual open and free ideology. Indeed, what makes Udacity different from the rest is that it is founded and owned by a venture capital company and as such one could wonder at what point the question of profits enters the discussion.
While the majority of these initiatives seem to stem from top universities in the US in one way or another, the various MOOC initiatives is that they have a relatively different organisation and structure. Udacity is founded by a venture capital company, Coursera is a social entrepreneurship initiative drawing on a large number of higher education institutions and EdX is a non-profit enterprise, including three of the very top universities in the world. However, despite their non-profit nature, the various MOOCs have this far attracted more than $100m of private venture capital investment and support from Google and Pearson, and the estimate is that by 2015, the sector will be worth $100bn worldwide. While introducing fees is the hot topic in a number of traditional higher education systems, these online initatives also have a potential for profits is not necessarily subscription fee but potential sales opportunities through other means.
However, the example published by Chronicle of the contract between Coursera and one university shows that  the division of revenues is already established in the contract, where the higher education institution receives a small cut (6-15% of the revenue) and it is up for Coursera to create revenue. A number of potential revenue sources have also been identified, including certification, identity verified testing to assure secure assessments, employee recruiting, employee and university screening, extended academic support, corporate universities, sponsorships and… surprise, surprise: tuition fees. Now, while including the potential for introducing fees for some courses is to be expected, this seems to go directly against the very core idea of MOOCs. Nevertheless, the inclusion of this into the contract perhaps indicates that the open and free ideology is potentially only skin deep.
While questions have been raised whether MOOCs have the potential to crumble the hegemony of the traditional face-to-face university, there is little evidence of this taking place just yet. The argument that you cannot replace traditional face-to-face learning completely was highlighted by Woodie Flowers, a MIT professor: “Education is much more subtle and complex and is likely to be accomplished through mentorship or apprentice-like interactions between a learner and an expert”. However, the various for-profit and/or online education institutions should perhaps think twice on what they can offer than MOOCs cannot, especially in the light of the issues the for-profit sector (in the US) is facing.
If you are interested in the ideas behind MOOCs, there is a number of intersting resources to view:

• listen to Chronicles podcast with George Siemens, one of the first innovators with MOOCs.
• view a TED talk with Daphne Koller, one of the founders of Coursera.

By marielk in Higher Education News. Social entrepreneurship is rapidly becoming a new buzz word on higher education. The Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) recently announced a new initiative focused on social entrepreneurship that will have a budget of £2 million, following up on earlier activities in the area. In cooperation with the Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs (UnLtd) 56 highe education institutions have been selected to lift the social entrepreneurship initiatives in these institutions.
While social engagement has been recognised as an important part of the third mission of universities, the focus on particularly social entrepeneurship now appears to have become an important mode for such activities. Last week on the Hedda blog we covered the various massive open online courses available, and the most popular one at the moment – Coursera – is structured as social entrepeneurship initiative.
So what does this mean? In very basic terms, social entrepreneurship means that in a context of entrepreneurship, focus and measure of success is through achieving social change (often meaning a solution to particular social problem) rather than maximizing pure private profits. While often presented as a fundamentally different, Austin, Stevenson and Vei-Skillern argued that the difference between commercial and social entrepeneurship are not necessarily dichotomous, but they rather form a continuum where an initiative can be more or less focused by societal or commercial goals. They further note that social entrepreneurship initiatives tend to be conceptualized by their goal, rather than organisational forms, which can be varied.Historically, Mair and Marti traced some notable exceptions back to 1960s:  Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild founded in 1968 by Bill Strictland, Grameen bank founded in 1976 to combat poverty in Bangladesh (the founder Muhammed Yunus received the Nobel peace prize in 2006), as well as Ashoka founded in 1980 that provided seed funding for new entrepeneurs. Nevertheless, it is also pointed out that in the research literature social entrepreneurship is still a relatively fuzzy concept with no clear understanding of what counts as social entrepreneurship.
The fuzzyiness of the concept in research literature is in accord with the variety of different activities that received support in the HEFCE initiative: from awareness activities to specific courses that would teach social entrepreneurship. It appears that there is also a clear focus on achieving a greater relevance of universities in their regions. HEFCE website quotes David Sweeney who is  the director of Research, Knowledge Exchange and Skills, and he argued that: “This unique initiative builds upon HEFCE’s partnership with UnLtd and will help university staff and students use their talent and enthusiasm to make a difference in the wider community.”
In many ways the launch of the initiative echoes well with the debates on the relevance of universities in contemporary society. Political and administrative spheres are increasingly entering into the inner life of universities through for example standardization processes and increased accountability measures, creating an ever more unstable environment and questions about the role of universities in solving important societal problems.
In this context, a greater focus on social entrepreneurship can increase the opportunities for universities to contribute directly into achieving social change with the available expertise and knowledge, and not least – make this contribution clearly visible. However, this also means that more focus in higher education studies could be put into understanding the dynamics of social entrepreneurship in higher education.

The Group of Eight (Go8), a network of the eight large research universities in Australia, has announced a round of scholarships for young scholarships from selected countries in Europe.
The Fellowships are open to early career researchers from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Russia and Croatia. Please note that both your country of residence and employment, and country of origin should be one of these countries (does not have to be the same country). You can read more about the eligibility requirements here.
Each fellow will receive benefits worth up to $20,000 to travel to Australia and work at selected Australian universities for up to 6 months. A potential target destination for higher education researchers is the LH Martin Institute in University of Melbourne. The research conducted there is mainly focused on higher education management and leadership, including themes such as professional development, productivity, relationship between higher and vocational education, performance measurement, and strategic management.
Application deadline 19th of October 2012
More information on the scholarship website or download the brochure here.