We’re happy to announce that we’ve released three online courses targeted to professionals looking for continuing education opportunities in building performance analysis. 

New today are Autodesk BPA Credits – which are being offered as a pilot to the first 500 people who sign-up for each course. The pilot will run until January 30, 2014. Then the courses will be revised based on feedback from users and re-opened in the first half of 2014.

These courses are based on our Building Performance Analysis (BPA) Certificate program, are pre-approved for continuing education units by both the AIA and GBCI/USGBC, and are free.

The BPA Certificate, launched on August 30th, is currently in use by over 4,000 students and 130 educators worldwide. The expansion of our educational offerings to professionals aims to further remove barriers to learning skills necessary for an industry-wide transition to performance-based sustainable design.

While the larger BPA Certificate course was developed to be used alongside semester-long courses in a higher-education setting, these BPA Credit courses can be done in an evening (~4 hours) and offer professionals the opportunity to dive into specific topics of interest.

Course Title	AIA credits	GBCI credits	Syllabus
Energy Literacy & Building Loads Covers building energy basics and uses conceptual energy analysis in Autodesk Vasari. See syllabus.	3.5	3.5
Whole Building Energy Analysis Covers building energy use, building constructions, and passive/active design strategies. Uses energy analysis in Autodesk Revit. See syllabus.	4.5	4.5
Daylight Analysis Covers the fundamentals of light, daylighting strategies, and some basics of electric lighting. Uses illuminance simulations in Autodesk Revit. See syllabus.	4.0	3.5

Within each of these courses, the content is currently the same as what is offered in the BPA Certificate. So if you’ve done, or are doing, the BPA Certificate – you do not need to sign up for these courses*. 

The intent of the pilot is to get high quality feedback from practicing professionals so that we can evolve the professional courses based on specific industry needs and feedback. So, if you do sign-up for the courses, please take the feedback aspect seriously and let us know how to improve.

To learn more and sign-up, see the Courses page of the Autodesk Sustainability Workshop website.

*The one difference is that the Daylighting BPA Credit course has a modified software exercise that requires more use of the software.

* You can get CEUs for the full BPA Certificate by reporting it yourself. However, the full course is not yet pre-approved in the AIA or USGBC course catalogs (it should be soon). If you self-report for hours after completing the BPA Certificate, please submit for 28 credits.