Courses Library

Over the past decades and increasingly over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, have increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning department amidst shrinking budgets. As business interests engage and influence public agencies and planning strategy, the role of ethics is of increasing importance for the practicing planner or urban designer. This is the first of a two-part series that evaluates and analyses the role of planners, from public window staff to department heads, in the increasingly business friendly environment in our governance and public realm. Instructor: Carol Barrett, FAICP

This first of four courses on the Census -- Background and Geography -- will prime you to understand how the Census works, where the data comes from, as well as vital terminology and data sets you should be familiar with in the built environment. Instructor: Dr. Chris Williamson, AICP

As the field of planning continues to trend toward multi-modal, sustainable transportation practices, tools to model or analyze the walkability of a given area have grown in number and complexity. In this course, students will learn how to apply ArcMap and the Spatial Analyst extension to model walkability. The course assumes students have a working knowledge of GIS and basic familiarity with Spatial Analyst. Instructor: Steph A. Nelson 2012

In this course, Planetizen brings you an overview of design in planning. Using real world examples from design guidelines, plans, and manuals, city planner Jason Kambitsis looks at how code, practice and guidelines precipitate design and the form of our cities. This overview is for students of city planning or planners who desire a refreshing overview of land use and form based codes and best practices in design formation and implementation in the United States. Instructor: Jason Kambitsis, AICP

Master the advanced features of SketchUp, including modeling historic structures and real-world buildings, working with SketchUp Plugins, and modeling complex forms. Instructor: Jaymes Dunsmore

Combining SketchUp and Adobe Creative Suite, this course demonstrates how to use SketchUp together with Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign to create illustrative and informative photo simulations, perspective views, sections and site plans. Instructor Instructor: Jaymes Dunsmore

In addition to accurately modeling projects, as demonstrated in the introductory courses, SketchUp is also useful for illustrating more abstract concepts, such as FAR, dimensional requirements and design guidelines. This course demonstrates how planners use SketchUp to illustrate requirements in zoning codes, design guidelines and form based codes. Instructor: Jaymes Dunsmore

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 Google Earth, data collection techniques, and observational methods to produce low-cost, implementable street designs for presentations and reports. Instructor: Amy Pfeiffer.

In urban environments throughout the country, children and older adults represent a disproportionate percentage of pedestrian injuries and fatalities in motor vehicle crashes. Many of these places have long established “Safe Routes to School” programs and policies for children, but are at a loss when it comes to making streets safer for older adults. As more people age in place and the population as a whole is living longer, creating streets that are easy, enjoyable and safe for older adults is crucial in urban environments. Instructor: Amy Pfeiffer.

This course utilizes Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5 to give you a brief "boot camp" course covering digital video production using Adobe's highly integratable software. The course introduces editing and video production fundamentals while also offering easy to follow instruction on the entire non-linear editing Premiere workflow. From setting up a new project and editing audio, graphics, titles to exporting your final product, this is a basic though comprehensive course to get you up and running exporting your own media for your communities, commissions, classrooms and committees. Instructor: Mike Newton

Adobe InDesign is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier document layout software, with a number of valuable applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction and Intermediate InDesign courses, giving you step-by-step instructions on my advanced features of InDesign CS6, all built around designing and composing a longer report/plan. Instructor: Mike Ernst

Adobe InDesign is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier document layout software, with a number of valuable applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction to InDesign course, giving you step-by-step instructions on some of the more complex tools that come with InDesign CS6. Instructor: Mike Ernst

Adobe InDesign is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier document layout software, with a number of valuable applications for urban planning. This course gives you a step-by-step introduction to the basic tools of InDesign CS6. Instructor: Mike Ernst. AICP CM Credits: 1.

Adobe Photoshop is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier image editing software, with a great many valuable applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction to Photoshop and Intermediate Photoshop Courses, giving you step-by-step instructions on some of the advanced tools that come with Photoshop CS5. Instructor: Mike Ernst

Adobe Photoshop is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier image editing software, with a great many valuable applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction to Photoshop course, giving you step-by-step instructions on some of the more complex tools that come with Photoshop CS5. Instructor: Mike Ernst

Adobe Photoshop is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier image editing software, with a great many valuable applications for urban planning. This course gives you a step-by-step introduction to the basic tools of Photoshop CS5. Instructor: Mike Ernst. AICP CM Credits: 1.

Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with manyvaluable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Intermediate Illustrator for Planners course, going into more detail on how the program can be used for logo design, map making and other uses. Instructor: Mike Ernst. AICP CM credits are available as part of the Illustrator series.

Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with many valuable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course builds upon the Introduction to Illustrator course, giving you step-by-step instructions on some of the more complex tools that come with Illustrator CS5. Instructor: Mike Ernst. AICP CM credits are available as part of the Illustrator series.

Adobe Illustrator is widely recognized among design professionals as the premier vector drawing software, with many valuable design and mapping applications for urban planning. This course gives you a step-by-step introduction to the basic tools of Illustrator CS5. Instructor: Mike Ernst. AICP CM credits are available as part of the Illustrator series.

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. The work of planning for communities is rooted in values, often unexpressed, about the role of government in working for a better future. So planners should, from time to time, examine their own values and those of the American Institute of Certified Planners as they go about their work in the public or private sectors. This course provides 2 CM credits, including the required 1.5 Ethics CM credits. Instructor: Carol D. Barrett, FAICP.

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. Dr. Evans-Cowley 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. Instructor: Jennifer Evans-Cowley, PhD, AICP.

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.

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. Instructor: Mike Ernst.

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. Instructor: Chuck Donley, AICP.

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.

Housing data helps planners make sense of many of the factors that shape the way communities develop. Collecting and analyzing this data is therefore a useful step in understanding housing conditions and developing planning solutions. This course presents an introductory yet comprehensive approach for data collection and evaluation that identifies important housing and household data sets, sources for the data, and ways to consider the planning implications of data. Throughout the course, Broward County, Florida, is used for demonstrative purposes, but viewers will be able to substitute another geography as they follow along. Instructor: Serge Atherwood

This course offers an introduction to CommunityViz, and addresses the myth that CommunityViz is only applicable to small town planning and requires extensive GIS datasets. Instsructor: Charles 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. 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. Instructor: Tim Halbur.

This course uses the CommunityViz Suitability Wizard within ArcGIS to find the best locations for land conservation. It provides a step-by-step introduction to basic suitability analysis, offering suitability concepts and applications. Learn how to implement a wide range of Suitability Wizard techniques including proximity to featres, feature overlap, grid/raster extraction, attribute values, and where clauses. 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.