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.