Back to School With the Open Risk Academy

Risk Management will not be the same going forward: too much is at stake

The summer is over in the Northern Hemisphere - and what an unusual summer has it been! Worldwide the implications and challenges of adjusting to a Covid-19 pandemic are still a major issue, affecting individuals, companies and governments.

At Open Risk we have been tracking and will continue to interpret the impact of the pandemic via a number of projects:

• Exploring Community Mobility Reports Using OpenCPM
• Comparing Google Community Mobility Reports Across Countries
• Covid-19 Pandemic Risk Events

At a more fundamental level the pandemic underscores the serious challenges of risk management methodologies, not unlike the serious stresses exposed during the Great Financial Crisis. If the GFC led us to formulate the Open Source Risk Modeling Manifesto, the present crisis is even more fundamental and far-reaching. It underscores how modern economies (and financial systems) have fundamental vulnerabilities that are routinely neglected even while they are real and present dangers. The shift into sustainable economies (and thus sustainable finance) will both have to accelerate and broaden in the coming years. We believe the mission of Open Risk is more than ever aligned with the required direction of travel.

Back-to-school with the Open Risk Academy

We continue with our mission of building the open future of risk management and in the spirit of the season, we launch further initiatives building on the capabilities of the Open Risk Academy. Our premise is that widely accessible learning is an essential strategy to enhance many aspects of risk management (in particular those related to methodologies and tools).

In the Back-to-School for 2020 we have more ways to access the Academy, new functionalities and more courses. In the rest of this post you will find a summary of the changes with pointers to further information where required:

More Installation Methods

The primary (and recommended) way to use the Academy is via the dedicated website (using your favorite browser). It is now possible to use also a dedicated Mobile or Desktop application to access and make available locally (off-line) some of the Academy content.

For instructions on how to install the mobile or desktop applications consult this page. If all goes well you should be able to access your Open Risk Academy learning content also via the Mobile or Desktop Application! If you encounter problems please let us know.

The Open Risk Academy via Mobile

The Open Risk Academy on the Desktop (off-line)

New Functionalities

Besides an overall refresh of the interface there are a number of new functionalities enabled:

Course Request Form

As the course catalog of the Academy grows we want to make sure that both the broad categories and the concrete courses and content it offers match what Academy users find most useful for their learning needs. To make the feedback process easier we introduce the New Course Request Form

This form is easily accessible (for registered users) from the front page of the Academy (on the right, Main Menu) as illustrated on the diagram below (or directly via this link!)

Once you open the form it requires the following, hopefully self-explanatory information:

• Course full name
• Course short name (can be the same as above)
• The Course Category (you can leave as General if unsure or make a comment if it should be in a new category)
• A Summary (of what the course should be about)
• Reasons for wanting this course (some indication of why it would be desirable to have the course in the Open Risk Academy)

Advanced Search across Open Risk Academy

There is now an improved search engine that searches all the publicly available content (located in the right-hand side column)

If you want to narrow down your search click on the advanced search link

The advanced search form allows you filter out which part of the Academy you want to search

• The title of some content
• The type of content
• The course it might be included in
• The time period

Latest Courses

The Latest Courses of the Academy (if you have not checked lately!):

• Introduction to GeoJSON a short course introducing the GeoJSON specification for the encoding of geospatial features.
• Introduction to Credit Contagion an introduction to the concept of credit contagion and how it can be modelled / simulated
• Introduction to Risk Data Review. This course is introducing the concept of a structured review of risk data
• Exploratory Risk Data Analysis, short course introducing exploratory data analysis using python

Get Involved! Explore the Academy and give us some feedback

A large fraction of the Academy is openly accessible. Our aspiration is to support a community of teachers and learners that will collectively enhance their risk management skills. Join the journey!