In the 2016 discussion on the Future of OERs, MIT’s Karen E. Willcox and Luwen Huang discussed the complexities of navigating the “data-rich” world of online education.

In their paper entitled: “Mapping Unbundled Open Education Resources: Pathways Through the Chaos”, they introduced the Xoces project which catalogs, structures, and visualizes learning outcomes within a curriculum. By creating visual analogues they are trying to:

determine the nature of what is being mapped—for instance, which entities are defined as points, what relationships can be defined as “roads” or pathways between points, and what clusters or “suburbs” of points may exist.“

A structured approach to educational mapping, the two authors claim, can offer a data driven future for open education, cartography being one major discipline that can help them to achieve this goal.

The FutuOER project was conceived of by Norman Bier and Brandon Muramatsu.