Course Library
Browse our library of planning courses
Introduction to Smart Cities
This course explores the characteristics and the challenges of smart cities, as well as the potential opportunities for smart cities within the design and planning fields. This course also discusses the drivers and the essential technologies in a smart city.
Transportation Planning: Making Transportation Plans—Rationality and Politics
This course explains the major forms of planning applicable to transportation, including rational comprehensive planning, strategic planning, policy analysis, incremental planning, advocacy planning, and communicative planning.
Transportation Planning: Effects on the Environment, Health, and Social Justice
This course discusses the local and global impacts of transportation systems and the mitigation of those impacts. The course also identifies prospects for change, as achieved by technology, transportation management, and pricing.
Virtual Reality for Planners 4: Refining the End User Experience
This final course of the virtual reality series discusses the big picture, looks at space planning and event setup, discusses alternatives to the full VR experience, and lists a few ways to fine tune the user’s experience for maximum success.
Virtual Reality for Planners 3: Working with Unity
In this third course of the virtual reality series, we will create a VR application from scratch using Unity. We will be adding SketchUp data, VR components, materials, textures, backgrounds, sky and finally virtual reality.
21st Century Storytelling: Video for Planners
This course will give you motivation to create video content, and give you practical, affordable tips to be heard among the online noise.
Conceptual Drawing for Planners
In this course, we will learn effective ways of drawing as a means to communicate design ideas and explore digital tools that support traditional drawing.
Mobile Drawing Apps for Planners
This course explores three affordable mobile drawing apps and how each might facilitate the planner’s creative process.
Understanding the Great Recession
This course explores the causes of the Great Recession, the recession's impact on local policy discussions, and how planners should think about economic impacts when thinking about long-term plans.
Economic Impact Analysis in Land Use Planning
This course examines how input-output models contribute to economic impact analyses and presents examples of how economic impact analysis can be applied in a wide range of planning projects.
Creating a Low-Carbon, Resilient City
This course introduces strategies for achieving low-carbon, resilient communities.
Greenhouse Gas Emissions Accounting for Cities
Greenhouse gas emissions accounting is a core tool for developing, implementing, and monitoring climate actions and strategies. This course provides a basic overview of concepts that can be supplemented with training in specific software.
Land Use Planning to Support Economic Development
This course provides a general understanding of macro level socio-economic and related business and industry trends likely to influence economic development plans and associated land use policies over the next twenty years.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Local Government and Governance
This course uses economic thinking to investigate local government. The course includes discussions of public goods, market failure, private communities, and homevoter cities.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Cities, Externalities, and Governance
Through history, people have become better off as they urbanized. This course investigates how and why the quality of life has improved in cities.
Photoshop CC for Planners 4: Creating Visual Simulations
In this course, we'll use the skills and techniques covered in the previous three Photoshop CC courses to create an advanced visual simulation of a re-imagined public space.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Economics of the Environment
This course provides an introduction to environmental economics by exploring the economic effects of national and local environmental policies. By the end of the course, you'll understand market failure, externalities, and private and social costs, applying these concepts to issues like recycling, species preservation, and climate change.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Supply and Demand
"Supply and demand" is one of the most fundamental concepts of economic thinking. The familiar supply and demand curves are seemingly simple, but in reality, the relationship between supply in demand is complex.
Photoshop CC for Planners 3: Advanced Techniques
This course builds upon the first two courses in the "Photoshop CC for Planners" series. In this installment, we'll cover more advanced functions in the program and start building a digital library, which we'll use in the next course to create a complex visual simulation.
Economic Thinking for Planners: Gains from Trade, Labor, and Immigration
This course focuses on the example of the Prisoner's Dilemma to illustrate the fact that gains from trade opportunities are lost if transactions and/or communications costs are high, property rights and contracting rules are not enforced, and levels of trust are low.