The courses are available to anyone, but are specifically built with a few key audiences in mind:

• MPO Staff: These courses are designed with oversight from other MPO staff to ensure they capture a boots-on-the-ground point of view. So whether your brand new or stepping into a new role, there’s a course for you!
• State DOT Liaisons: It’s not just MPOs that are facing high turnover rates, so are State DOTs. Think of this as an easy way to onboard new staff to better engage with your MPOs.
• FHWA Division/FTA Region Offices: Similar to the DOTs, all stakeholders in the 3C process should understand MPO basics. We continually work with USDOT HQ to ensure our materials are up-to-date and accurate based on the latest federal guidance.
• Board Members: When you’re elected to office you most likely aren’t thinking that you may end up serving on an MPO Board so consider this your one-stop shop for training so you can better serve your region.
• Students: There’s a lot to cover in planning and policy programs – and MPOs are a pretty unique community. Expand your horizons and build your resume with additional courses!

We are an approved CM provider for the national American Planning Association. Courses that have been approved will list the available AICP credits under the course description.

As well as AICP, each course will provide an MPO Institute certificate upon completion. These certificates are a great way to track staff professional development and demonstrate you have the knowledge you need for career advancement.

We’d love to work with you! We’re in the initial stages of partnering with a handful of universities to take the MPO 101 course and scale it down for students. Our goal is to provide this abbreviated MPO 101 course for free to students and if possible, connect you with a local MPO Director for an optional guest lecture.

If you’re interested in participating please contact Caitlin Cook, ccook@ampo.org for more information.

Simply click “Sign Up” in the top right hand corner of the Institute Portal page and create a username and login. Once you have created a login you can enter the portal. Within the Portal there is a section called “Course Catalogue”; go here to view the available courses. Once you have found a course you’d like to take, click “Get this Course” and enter in your credit card information. And that’s it!

Absolutely! There’s nothing like an in-person workshop to really dive deep on new material, discuss ideas in a group, and ask questions. We plan to provide in-person workshops starting at the end of 2024. For pricing and more details please contact staff.

We hear you, it feels like there are a million things we need to cover. We’ve decided to start with the basics of MPOs and are prioritizing those courses first, which is why you’ll see in our initial offerings the MPO 101 and Federal Funding Courses. But we’ve already identified the need for courses such as:

• Deep Dives into Core Products (MTP, TIP, UPWP, etc)
• EJ/Title VI/Equity Practices
• Performance Based Planning & Programming
• Board Training
• Executive Director Training (HR, Ethics, Staffing)
• Trending Topics (EV, AI in Planning, Housing)

If you have ideas for courses, please reach out to Caitlin Cook, ccook@ampo.org!

This is the newest program from the AMPO Research Foundation, a nonprofit federal 501(c)(3) established in 2013 as an educational foundation with a mission to serve the transportation planning community to improve livability and quality of life in metropolitan regions through the metropolitan planning process. The Research Foundation operates separately from AMPO dues. You may be familiar with the ActivitySim project within the Research Foundation, which is funded through a pooled-funding consortium.

So short answer, the Research Foundation operates independently from dues and traditionally has relied on pooled funding and grants, which means the MPO Institute, as the newest program, needs to be revenue-generating to operate. We’d like to get to a point where we can afford to make core courses free to the AMPO community, and in the meantime we’re trying to make content as affordable as possible.