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All Census Courses
Hand Drawing Master Plans
This course provides an introduction to urban design sketching by teaching how to draw urban design sketches and master plans using a mix of colored and black ink. These drawing techniques can be used to create plans that are detailed and expressive enough to use both in academic and professional presentations.
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.
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 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 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.
Tableau for Planners 3: Dashboards
This course will expand on the Tableau for Planners: Introduction and Worksheets. Students will have prior experience will building basic tables and will start to use Tableau to build multi-worksheet dashboards with interactive controls like filtering. Students will also learn how to make the data used in their visualization accessible to the public. At the end of the course, we will demonstrate how to publish the work to Tableau Public and embed dashboards on websites and in social media.
Tableau for Planners 2: Worksheets
This course will expand on the Tableau for Planners: Introduction course. This course continues to train the planner on how to build effective worksheets for planners. This course will introduce general principles of data visualization and orient the user with the Tableau platform, with a primary focus on Tableau Public, a free version of Tableau's desktop software.
Tableau for Planners: Introduction
This course will introduce general principles of data visualization and orient the user with the Tableau platform. Learn how to connect to a data set in Microsoft Excel, understand general principles of a relational database, and start building basic worksheets and dashboards.
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.
Storytelling for Planners
This course will teach planners how to adapt proven storytelling methods employed by creative artists for centuries. We will cover the storytelling applications to analog and digital outreach methods.
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.
Crowdsourcing and Urban Planning
Crowdsourcing is the gathering of ideas, content, voices, and services by leveraging the collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds.
Digital Publishing for Planners
This course identifies popular digital publishing methods, and explains tradeoffs between user-friendly self-publishing tools and premium hosting services.
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.
Blogging About Planning
In this course we will review how blogs are used as planning tools to educate and engage participants in community decisions.
Regulating Electronic Message Centers
This course provides practical, solution-focused guidance for regulations that leverage digital sign technology while protecting community aesthetic values and safety concerns. This course is available for free.
SketchUp 2016 for Planners: Site Planning
This course introduces intermediate SketchUp skills, like the program's geolocation functions, and demonstrates how to create more complex models of planned projects or developments.
SketchUp 2016 for Planners: Introduction
This course introduces how planners and architects represent three-dimensional objects in two-dimensions, with step-by-step instructions for creating and using simple 3D models.
Planning and Promoting Your Community Engagement Process
This course provides you with a step-by-step process for designing an effective public engagement process.