Courses Library

This engaging and practical course provides professional planners with a thorough and thoughtful discussion of ethical concerns that many planners are likely to face in their careers. Instructor Carol D. Barrett, FAICP, has been thinking about practical planning ethics since she was first directed to do something illegal on the job, almost thirty years ago. This course provides 2 CM credits, including the required 1.5 Ethics CM credits.

Learn the basics of Google Sketchup, the easy-to-use drafting program that interfaces with Google Earth. This course assumes no prior experience with SketchUp and builds your skills up from scratch using a basic home design as a practice exercise. Your instructor, Ron Golan, is an architect who has decades of experience designing buildings. Since Sketchup came on the scene, Ron has used it often and proclaimed its virtues. He continues to feel that Sketchup is one of the best 3D modeling and thinking tools available and well worth learning.

Tasked with implementing a new complete streets policy for a city or town or responding to community concerns about street safety, knowing how and where to begin, especially if you don’t know the place well, can be puzzling. This course uses practical and abstract concepts to provide planners tools to define a pedestrian planning study using Goggle Earth, data collection techniques, and observational methods to produce low-cost, implementable street designs for presentations and reports. Your instructor, Amy Pfeiffer, is a transportation planner and principal of PFoundation Works. She has over 11 years experience in transportation planning working with Nelson Nygaard, Transportation Alternatives, and The New York City Department of City Planning.

As more and more cities make release their data, smartphones are becoming an essential tool in citizen engagement and participation. Apps and mobile websites give planners the ability to seek input from their communities, receive pictures of potholes and nuisances, and deliver useful info on public meetings. Instructor: Dr. Jennifer Evans-Cowley, AICP.

These videos will introduce you to Google Earth. The session will explore basic tasks for using Google Earth in planning. Topics will include finding places, moving around them, saving a location, viewing a site photo and capturing images for presentation. The subject matter is a compelling exploration of Washington DC with a discussion of the tool's applicability to planning. Chuck Donley, AICP is an urban planner who specializes in applying technology to planning issues. He brings 30 years of experience in public and private sector planning working on current and long range processes.

Google Earth is Google's popular and powerful geographic mapping tool that incorporates an array of planning functions. These intermediate lessons explain how to load your own images onto Google Earth and manipulate them so they appear properly in the landscape. You'll learn how to create and manage new layers, add paths to represent roads, and create a tour of the locations you've created. The course also covers skyline analysis and how to measure distances. Instructor: Chuck Donley, AICP.

LinkedIn is an undervalued tool for professional networking and crafting your online identity. This course gives a step-by-step guide to setting up your LinkedIn profile and using it to your best advantage. Your instructor, Mike Ernst, is an urban planner and designer whose work has focused on participatory planning, community outreach and innovative urban design through new technologies.

This introductory course is designed to help anyone create online maps using the Google Maps website, with a focus on using Google Maps in a planning capacity. Christian Peralta, your instructor, is a contributing editor for Planetizen, having served as managing editor from 2006 and 2008. He is currently the Web and New Media Manager for the National Capital Planning Commission in Washington, D.C.

Google Earth is Google's popular and powerful geographic mapping tool that incorporates an array of planning functions. The advanced lessons explore the special functions of Google Earth Pro, including importing data types, importing spreadsheets with directional coordinates, and adding image overlays to those coordinates. Instructor: Chuck Donley, AICP.

Explore how to use Twitter to engage with the public in planning processes. Learn how to take those 140 character messages and turn them into meaningful analysis that can influence your planning process. Jennifer Evans-Cowley, PhD, AICP, is a Professor and Section Head of City and Regional Planning at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. Dr. Evans-Cowley, your instructor, is a Professor and Section Head of City and Regional Planning at the Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University. She regularly teaches courses to prepare candidates to take the AICP* exam and serves as the professional development officer for the Ohio Chapter of the American Planning Association.

This class uses the CommunityViz Suitability Wizard to find the best locations for land conservation. The introduction includes urban examples of suitability analysis, and suitability concepts based on the McHargian methodology. The example implements a range of Suitability Wizard techniques including proximity to features, feature overlap, grid/raster extraction, attribute values and where clauses. Slider bars for weighting of factors and separate scoring scenarios offer powerful decision-support capabilities. The analysis prioritizes parcels for acquisition. Charles A. Donley, AICP, your instructor, is an urban planner who specializes in applying technology to planning issues. Chuck was formerly Technical Director for CommunityViz, where he guided training, professional services, technical support, and software development.

This class explores more advanced suitability techniques using ArcGIS and CommunityViz. Primary topics include unioning layers in Model Builder, writing formulas in CommunityViz, updating the Suitability Wizard, and performing raster analysis using ArcGIS Spatial Analyst. These topics expand upon various methods demonstrated in the Introduction to Suitability course. Instructor: Charles A. Donley, AICP.

Video can be a highly effective tool for communicating planning issues and increasing public knowledge and participation. It's easier than ever to create videos yourself with little to no money. Tim Halbur, managing editor of Planetizen, shares his media expertise. This video course will walk you through the three steps of creating a video: capturing the footage, creating the video with editing software, and distributing it across the web. We’ll look at examples of planning departments that have used video well, and review different content types that you can use as a model.