Timeline

Phase I. Prior to Summer, 2017

    • Developed loss data analytics learning objectives consistent with actuarial professional associations

    • Spanish translation team - Univ Barcelona will take a lead in this effort. Will need to develop a process.

    • Sent out a preliminary announcement via E&R Section listserve to get feedback on proposed table of contents on May 13, 2016

    • Tinkered with WordPress, PressBooks, and H5P, capabilities

    • Presentation at the Actuarial Research Conference, July 2016

    • Developed R Bookdown tools for writing the text

    • Developed GitHub as a repository for hosting the development work.

    • Chapters 1 and 3 are complete. In particular, Chapter 3 by Zenaib Amin (with substantial feedback by Iwahiro Awasawa) serves as a model chapter to demonstrate the usefulness of the project.

Phase II. Summer, 2017

    • Organizing notes for Life Contingencies that will serve as a basis for a second open textbook

    • Presentation at the Actuarial Research Conference, July 2017

    • We have author commitments for 8 of the first (core) 11 chapters. A tentative commitment for one more chapter and invitations out to the other two. See the Table of Contents page for current information.

    • The International Association of Black Actuaries has agreed to be a (non-monetary) sponsor of the series.

Phase III. Beginning Sept, 2017

    • We now have author commitments for all 15 chapters (putting a hold on Advanced Topics 16 and 17 for the moment).

    • We are developing an "organization" on GitHub to, well, organize our repositories there (Jacques Rioux and Larry Hua are heading this up).

    • As of March 2018, our goal is to get chapter drafts in my May 2018. After reviewing and editing, the hope is to get a draft of the book by summer of 2018.

Phase IV. July, 2018

    • Completed: 10 chapters, plus 3 appendices

    • In Process: We have pieces of another 2, with plans for 3 more chapters

    • Much of the summer has been spent tying together the chapters to provide a consistent look and feel - we now have a Style Guide available for authors.

    • Support materials: Another site that provides R Codes has been polished

The draft is looking very nice. Many will use it beginning this Fall as a resource in classes. Having students give feedback is a great way to improve the work.

September, 2018

  • A Github organization has been established, drafts are available at:

  • We will continue to use https://ewfrees.github.io/ as a development site. In particular, some style codes were provided by Rob Hyndsman at Monash University, so I think you'll find the look of the online version much cleaner than before.

  • As in late July, 10 chapters plus 3 appendices are in, 5 to go. For the 10 chapters, we have 35 reviewers signed up with 22 reviews that have been turned in.

  • A Style Guide has been completed, https://openacttexts.github.io/StyleGuideLDA/index.html . In particular, I was pretty vague about the role of exercises before and I think I have more clarity in this regard now.

  • The presentation at the Actuarial Research Conference seemed to go well, I signed up several more people to review our work.