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Virtual Reality for Planners 1: Introduction
Virtual reality presents urban planners with a unique tool to create immersive virtual experiences that can inform visioning processes, design decision-making, and community engagement. Learn about the evolution of virtual reality technology, its key vocabulary and logistics, the benefits of virtual reality over traditional media, and what the future of public engagement may hold.
Virtual Reality for Planners 2: Modeling in SketchUp
This course provides a step-by-step SketchUp tutorial and teaches users how to create content appropriate for a virtual reality environment. Viewers will learn how to optimize the performance of their software and ensure success in the next steps of the process, including final model export to Unity.
Virtual Reality for Planners 3: Working with Unity
This course provides a high-level overview of the process involved in creating a virtual reality application and teaches viewers how to assemble a virtual reality application from scratch using Unity how to make the process as successful as possible.
Virtual Reality for Planners 4: Refining the End User Experience
Creating a VR experience is one thing, but managing its use at public events and integrating it into the urban design workflow is an extra, separate step. This course considers the bigger picture and covers a few ways to fine-tune the user’s experience for maximum success.
Defining Neighborhoods
This course reviews the varying definitions of neighborhoods and examines methods for defining a physical basis and tangible meaning to neighborhoods based on the location of neighborhood centers, boundaries, and spatial extents.
Blogging About Planning
In this course we will review how blogs are used as planning tools to educate and engage participants in community decisions.
Writing Master Plans, From Start to Finish
In this course you’ll learn how to approach a master plan—starting with concept development and community voice, and finishing with the mechanics of organizing and expressing ideas.
External Relations for Planners
This course teaches customer service concepts, skills, and strategies to reflect well on planning organizations, and also make planners more effective in their work.
Leadership in Planning: Strategic Decision-Making in the Public Interest
At the end of this course, you will understand how to turn planning theory into practice in the real world.
Citizen Science in Urban Planning
This course introduces planners to citizen science and how citizen science can play a meaningful role in urban planning.
Crowdsourcing and Urban Planning
Crowdsourcing is the gathering of ideas, content, voices, and services by leveraging the collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds.
Best Practices for Community Engagement
This course provides you with solid understanding of the benefits to community engagement, the psychology of public participants, an overview of the tools and tactics to choose from and advice on the creation of a public engagement plan to meet the needs of your projects.
Planning and Promoting Your Community Engagement Process
This course provides you with a step-by-step process for designing an effective public engagement process.
MetroQuest Public Involvement Software: In Practice and In Action
This course provides an introduction to working with MetroQuest, what it helps planners achieve, and some of its most important features and capabilities. The course also presents a series of case studies to demonstrate the results MetroQuest has achieved for a wide range of planning projects.
Comprehensive Planning for Healthy Communities
This course covers the process of incorporating public health goals into a General Plan or Comprehensive Plan for a region, county, city, town, or neighborhood.
Introduction to Charrettes
This course introduces the NCI System, a collaborative, design-based approach to public involvement.
The Charrette Way: The Secrets to Collaborative Creativity
This course explores the transformative dynamics taking place in a multiple-day charrette.
Writing for Planners: Documents that Work
This course reviews the different types of documents planners are called on to write—from one-page memos to complex master plans—and apply a simple writing approach that ensures the document's points are complete, compelling, and accurate.
Tactical Urbanism: How It's Done
From unsanctioned crosswalks to city-led "Pavement-to-Plaza" programs, instructor Mike Lydon describes the success of short-term, temporary projects in influencing long-term physical and policy changes in cities across the United States and Canada.
Ethics: Balancing a Business Friendly Planning Environment
Over the past few decades and increasingly over the past several years, the private sector, led by developers, has increasingly courted, conflicted and collaborated with planning departments amid 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. 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 an increasingly business-friendly environment.
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