For several years I have been a member of the Open Planning Tools Group, an innovative group of practitioners and scholars interested in scenario planning and the development and use of new planning tools. After many discussions, the group decided to take some more concrete steps to create resources for planning educators. I decided to volunteer to lead the effort, launched in August 2014, since I knew I would be developing a new class on scenario planning.

I’m happy to announce we have completed three of the resources we set out to create, which was made possible by all of the group members, but especially Jennifer Minner (Cornell), Bob Paterson and Tom Hilde (U. Texas), Keuntae Kim (U. Utah), Ray Quay (Arizone State), and Peter Bishop (University of Houston).

The materials have been posted to the group website, and include:

• A syllabi library of courses involving scenario planning and/or innovative GIS, visualization, or other technical tools;
• A set of laboratory exercises, including data, and a corresponding course structure;
• a course development guide where we have compiled lessons learned from three recent courses offered by group members.

Still in development is a citation library for instructors to use when designing new courses, although the syllabi feature many helpful citations.

These products should be considered works in progress, and we look forward to feedback for how they might be improved in the future.