WordPress Delivery Mechanism

We are now developing the books via R Bookdown and GitHub. However, we may also want to eventually return to the WordPress environment. So, this page is a place-keeper for now.

Most people know WordPress as a blogging tool but the open educational resource community has embraced this tool as a primary mechanism for developing online textbooks. A leader in this regard is PressBooks, an organization that provides readily available tools for translating WordPress content into other formats, including .pdf and ebook formats.

Why not just write a .pdf book and publish it freely on the web?

A freely available .pdf book represents an excellent first step in providing an open educational resource. However, a WordPress delivery mechanism such as we will adopt offers several advantages:

• 1. Content can be translated into a different language so that a user can readily switch languages at the click of a button.

  2. It has the flexibility to incorporate many interactive features, such as quizzes, multiple choice questions, flash cards, and the like. See the WordPress plug-in "H5P" for a list of features readily available. Capabilities for interactive features facilitates learning by doing.

  3. As another type of active learning, we are able to readily incorporate statistical code examples and tutorials into our site. This type of "learning by doing" is important for scientific books such as Loss Data Analytics.

  4. For some teachers, an important advantage of PressBooks is that its content can be imported via LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) into a learning management system, such as Moodle or Canvas.

  5. For long run development of the site, a useful feature of H5P is that it allows us to not only see how often different aspects of a site are being used (a feature that we could also get using Google Analytics) but also how well viewers do on quizzes and other interactive media. Admittedly, this feature is beyond our current short-term goals of developing an open text but it is nice to have this capability built in for future development.

Do I need to know WordPress to help with the project?

No, we suspect that most authors and other contributors will not know WordPress. Most content developers will write in latex or Word and then send the content to us (currently at University of Wisconsin). Then, we will convert the content to WordPress and upload it on the site. (This is exactly how the Frees pilot site was done - a graduate student learned enough WordPress to convert half of a latex book into WordPress).

Still, WordPress is html based and very easy to learn. We suspect that most content editors will probably pick up enough WordPress to make small edits to their files. If the project develops, we anticipate that an actuarial community of WordPress users will develop.