I have an idea about how to make Learning Objects attractive to teaching 
faculty and bring current science research findings into the course.  The 
appeal to teaching faculty is a convenient way to keep courses up-to-date 
without a lot of work. The basic idea is to repurpose the highly structured 
science article into a sharable content object (SCO) that is suitable to 
deliver/present to undergraduate students as part of an existing course. (there 
is a more detailed description of the idea as applied to psychology at url:

http://www.edtechpost.ca/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ScienceArticles2SCO

The present system as I understand and use it is to discover "interesting"
articles that enhance my course and then manually transform the main content of
the article into a few slides and notes to be used in the classroom.  My
previous rendition of the course is thereby updated with new and interesting
material that both keeps me more current in my field and enables my students to
see a little about what is new in science (perhaps contradicting the older
material in the textbook).  In psychology it has been estimated that the volume
of scientific literature doubles every 5 years and this dynamism sets the stage
for courses to all become backward looking historical experiences bereft of the
excitement of new findings and new ideas.

The larger goal is to reduce the time lag from the discovery of scientific 
findings to the educational comprehension of those findings.  Normal lags in
psychology text books seem to run from 2 to 4 years and then the "findings" are
not necessarily packaged for easy presentation/delivery to students.  By
facilitating a community of interested researchers, faculty, graduate students,
and even advanced undergraduates the current scientific literature that is
produced for other researchers could be repurposed/repackaged into standardized
sharable content objects that are distributed through learning object
repositories.  Publishers might even be interested in providing the SCO's of
their own design to augment new textbooks and journals.

It seems to me that with modern content authoring tools and customized macros
that templates for disseminating research findings to students could be 
developed and refined with the help of a start up type of grant that would 
strategically bring together a community that could facilitate the production 
and dissemination of new science findings in the form of sharable content 
objects distributed through a network of Learning Object Repositories.  These 
SCO's would have some level of authority because the articles they were based on 
would already have been peer reviewed or have a citation record that makes them 
important.  It would seem to be important that the community of science 
educators be composed of many disciplines and that these might be strategically 
selected to represent greater likelihood of downstream funding support. 

The second phase of the project would be to try to bring the new science SCO
production into the mainstream and make it widely available to educators both as 
users and producers/adapters of sharable content objects for Higher Education.  
The notion would be to make plug and play and make the Learning Object 
Repositories a viable source of new science findings for teaching/learning.   
The second phase of the project would develop a visible market for new 
teaching/learning materials using the recent communication advances in searching 
and syndication.  And importantly, it would provide a vehicle for publication of 
undergraduate work from the potential army of undergraduates who produce 
projects that render articles into sharable content objects for a course mark. 
(To me this seems like a much better assignment than writing a normal paper and 
it has the advantage of 1. nothing there to plagiarize, it is focused on the 
important intellectual content of the scientific article, and it fits well into 
the student peer review model of pedagogy so the submitted projects can be of 
better than first draft quality).  This new form of educational artifact could 
be promoted with various forms of institutional and state competitions as well 
as national "prizes" in the same manner as other forms of scholarship.

Now the big question for you: How might this project idea be funded?

Cheers
Bruce