FutureLearn Course Spider

Introduction

The FutureLearn Course Spider - Run is an Apify Actor designed to scrape and collect detailed course information from FutureLearn.com. It navigates through specified pages to extract data such as course titles, introductions, providers, durations, ratings, and more, delivering structured results for easy analysis or integration.

Input Parameters

The Actor accepts a JSON input with the following parameters:

Parameter	Type	Required	Description
StartPage	Integer	Yes	The starting page number for scraping courses.
MaxPages	Integer	Yes	The maximum number of pages to scrape.

Example input:

{
  "StartPage": 1,
  "MaxPages": 100
}

Features

• Paginated Scraping: Efficiently crawls multiple pages on FutureLearn, starting from a specified page up to a maximum limit.
• Comprehensive Data Extraction: Gathers rich details including course ID, title, URL, provider, duration, ratings, category, and metadata like Unlimited inclusion.
• Structured JSON Output: Returns results in a clean, parsable JSON array for straightforward use in applications or databases.
• Flexible Configuration: Allows users to control the scope of scraping with start and max page parameters for targeted data collection.
• Reliable and Up-to-Date: Ensures fresh course data from FutureLearn without manual effort.

Possible Use Cases

• Educational Research: Analyze course trends, such as popular categories, average ratings, or provider distributions across pages.
• Content Curation: Build custom course catalogs or recommendation systems by aggregating FutureLearn data.
• Market Insights: Evaluate online learning offerings, including durations and review metrics, for competitive analysis.
• Personal Development Tools: Integrate scraped data into apps for users to discover and compare courses efficiently.
• Data Enrichment: Enhance datasets for reporting, AI models, or dashboards with structured FutureLearn course information.

Output

The Actor outputs an array of JSON objects, each representing a scraped course. Example output:

[
  {
    "course_id": 1187,
    "course_slug": "bookkeeping-financial-accounting",
    "course_url": "https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/bookkeeping-financial-accounting",
    "title": "Bookkeeping for Personal and Business Accounting",
    "introduction": "Learn how to balance your books and develop the skills to manage finances in personal and business environments.",
    "image_url": "https://ugc.futurelearn.com/uploads/images/5d/cb/thumbnail_5dcb270b-8e7c-4582-b9c6-3c3bc9b7888a.jpg",
    "image_alt": "man and woman at desk with laptop, calculator and printed paper with table of numbers",
    "provider": "The Open University",
    "duration_weeks": "4 weeks",
    "hours_per_week": "3 hrs per week",
    "total_reviews": 155,
    "average_rating": 4.45806,
    "category": "Business & Management",
    "course_type_metadata": [
      {
        "icon": "unlimited",
        "label": "Included in Unlimited"
      }
    ],
    "is_study_uk": false
  },
  {
    "course_id": 928,
    "course_slug": "perioperative-medicine",
    "course_url": "https://www.futurelearn.com/courses/perioperative-medicine",
    "title": "Perioperative Medicine in Action",
    "introduction": "Explore perioperative medicine and how you can improve care for the high risk surgical patient. Join this RCoA endorsed course.",
    "image_url": "https://ugc.futurelearn.com/uploads/images/42/83/thumbnail_4283e6ec-7adb-48a0-b7df-5327551c1988.jpg",
    "image_alt": "",
    "provider": "UCL (University College London)",
    "duration_weeks": "4 weeks",
    "hours_per_week": "3 hrs per week",
    "total_reviews": 236,
    "average_rating": 4.73729,
    "category": "Healthcare & Medicine",
    "course_type_metadata": [
      {
        "icon": "unlimited",
        "label": "Included in Unlimited"
      }
    ],
    "is_study_uk": false
  }
]

Support

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