Description: It was an honor, for Dr. Tianyang Wang, Co-Eeditor of Expanding Horizons, to have this Fireside Chat had a great conversation with Dr. Guillen Guillen Estany in January 2023, and invited her for this featured Fireside Chat interview which resulted in a great conversation.

Description: Article from Associations Now July 2010 issue featuring the success of the SOA Strategic Plan.

Description: An article giving a summary of the Asia Pacific Teaching Conference that took place in Bangkok in December 2022. This article will be disseminated via SOA News Weekly, which will link to the article on soa.org.

Description: This article is about the Society is becoming significantly more active on the international scene. Specifically, the activities of ambassadorial visits to Asia and Australia were described.

Description: Over the last two years, we experimented with online peer assessment platforms in undergraduate courses and saw them deliver major learning advantages and be highly popular with students. We explain why peer assessment shows great promise for actuarial science education and the main factors to consider when designing peer assessment activities. We also detail our use of online platforms in two undergraduate courses. By sharing our experience, we hope to provide you, our fellow educators, with a solid starting point for experimenting with this format.

Description: A brief review of a successful conference for young researchers in actuarial science and risk management.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is a membership organization dedicated to education, research, and the profession. This session will provide an overview of the SOA and its various university programs and initiatives.

Description: Traditionally the SOA formulates pedagogic excellence in terms of the Marzano Taxonomy. For example, the "analysis level" consisting of generalization, specification, classification, contrast, matching, and error identification, is considered superior to the "retrieval level" consisting of rote memorization such as recognition, recall, and using. In this presentation, we first show that pedagogic excellence can be equivalently, but more simply, formulated in terms of executive function and goal-setting. Here executive function refers to problems requiring multiple mental modalities - such as, formal, verbal, computational, and graphical - for their solution. Goal-setting refers to the skillful breakup of a complex problem into a sequence of subgoals each of which is clearly formulated, challenging, but achievable timely. Light examples from the literature illustrate these concepts. Five "challenging FM problems": reinvestment, refinancing, multiple rate/deposit problems, pricing deferred bonds using a term structure, and obscure loan problems, illustrate the following fundamental techniques of goal-setting and executive function: i) a fellowship approach to teaching preliminary exam material, ii) using subgoals to give difficult homework, iii) alternating between different mental modalities to achieve elegant brevity in solutions, iv) goal-setting reflecting familiar vs. new, and v) skillful definition of unit subgoals.

Description: Since the world in which actuaries work is both expanding (through 'data science' opportunities) and contracting (since 'data scientists' are doing work formerly done by actuaries), the role of education actuaries is at a tipping point. Members of the Society who are in higher education and representatives from the business community will discuss ways in which the two worlds of business and education have worked together in the past, what can be done by each group to assist the other, and what the future may hold.

Description: The Society of Actuaries (SOA) is dedicated to advancing education and research for the actuarial profession. As part of its mission, the SOA recognizes the importance of partnering with colleges and universities to help develop future actuaries. With this in mind, the SOA’s Research Department is holding a Student Research Case Study Challenge, which provides an opportunity for teams of students to apply their actuarial skills on a real-world problem in a business setting.