Part 3 A Call for Volunteers
The proposal and plan to date is based on a developed book Loss Data Analytics as well as a template for a comparable online tutorial on regression that has worked well so far. However, as we gain access to more creative and dedicated volunteers, we are hopeful to improve our design for short course offerings.
Alternative Course Designs
As we develop our principles of formulating effective short courses, it will be helpful to benchmark against alternative course designs and ideas. Here is a list of a few; expect to see this list grow.
Use of R as a Tool for Interactive Books and Short Courses
There are many great tools that have been developed to author books (e.g., Word, latex) and interactive short courses (e.g., Wordpress). However, we are using R as a tool for writing (books and webpages) through its markdown capabilities, including the package bookdown. Further, we are using the R package tutorial from the Datacamp Lite suite for our interactive problems. The use of R is well known to the actuarial community - we hope that promoting its application for authoring our books and short courses will help in recruiting a broad and sustainable group of authors and other volunteers from the actuarial community.
Discussion Forum
We are hoping to promote discussion among users of the course, one option we are exploring is the resource Disqus.
More broadly, an alternative/complementary idea is to include an Ask a Mentor button to each chapter section. This would require volunteers to help implement proper design and functionality for this “Reader Seeking Guidance” feature to optimally benefit those who do not have an access to a professor or someone else familiar with the subject content. Volunteers serving content mentors would respond to reader questions and use the questions to improve/transform the content structure, including examples presented to next level or as supplement sections.
Audio Book and Podcast Options
There is also interest in adding audio book and podcast options to the course. To make this happen, we seek volunteers to help implement proper design and functionality for the audio feature to optimally benefit visual and reading-skill challenged audiences.
Interactive Features
An online short course can be distinguished from a textbook based on the quantity and quality of interactive features offered. This repository describes the interactive features being contemplated in the context of Loss Data Analytics. We seek creative volunteers who wish to explore adoption of tools that allows the user to interact with our content.