🎨 Skillshare Course Scraper

🚀 Export Skillshare course data to CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML in seconds. No account needed. No API key required.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-22 · 📊 10 fields per record · Up to 1,000,000 courses · Global catalog

Skillshare is one of the largest online learning platforms, hosting tens of thousands of creative and professional courses. This Actor searches the Skillshare catalog by keyword using their internal API, and delivers a structured dataset with course titles, teachers, durations, student counts, ratings, and direct URLs - all without needing a Skillshare subscription.

Data is fetched live from Skillshare's API on every run. Results are sorted by popularity and paginated automatically until your maxItems limit is reached.

Coverage: The full Skillshare course catalog across all categories - design, photography, illustration, business, marketing, technology, writing, lifestyle, and more. Each record includes the course thumbnail, teacher name and profile link, duration, project count, student count, rating score, category, and course URL.

🎯 Target Audience / Use Cases

Who uses this	What they do with it
EdTech researchers	Analyze course catalog trends, pricing, and instructor popularity
Content strategists	Research which topics attract the most students on Skillshare
Online educators	Benchmark their courses against the competition
Market analysts	Track the growth of creative education categories
Developers	Build course recommendation engines or educational dashboards
Recruiters	Identify top instructors in a specific creative field

📋 What the Skillshare Scraper does

• Searches the full Skillshare catalog by any keyword
• Returns results sorted by popularity (most students first)
• Paginates through all result pages automatically (24 courses per page)
• Fetches teacher name, profile URL, and all course metadata
• Computes a normalized rating score from positive/total review ratio
• Delivers a clean structured dataset: one record per course

💡 Why it matters: Skillshare has no public search API for external use. Manually collecting course metadata for research or competitive analysis is impractical at scale. This Actor automates the entire process and gives you a download-ready dataset in minutes.

🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon

⚙️ Input

Field	Type	Required	Default	Description
query	string	No	photography	Keyword to search (e.g. "python", "watercolor", "logo design")
maxItems	integer	No	10	Max courses to collect. Free: 10. Paid: up to 1,000,000.

Example 1 - Search for photography courses:

{
  "query": "photography",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Example 2 - Search for Python programming courses:

{
  "query": "python programming",
  "maxItems": 200
}

⚠️ Good to Know: Results are sorted by popularity (most enrolled students first). This gives you the most relevant courses for any topic. The Actor uses residential proxies to ensure reliable access to the Skillshare API.

📊 Output

Field	Type	Description
🖼️ imageUrl	string	Course thumbnail URL
📌 title	string	Full course title
👤 teacherName	string	Instructor's full name
🔗 teacherUrl	string	URL to instructor's Skillshare profile
⏱️ duration	string	Course length (e.g. "1h 32m", "45m")
📁 projectCount	number	Number of class projects
👥 studentCount	number	Total number of enrolled students
⭐ rating	number	Normalized rating (0-1 scale, from positive/total reviews)
🗂️ category	string	Course category (e.g. Design, Photography)
🔗 courseUrl	string	Direct URL to the Skillshare course page
🕒 scrapedAt	string	ISO timestamp when this record was collected

Sample record:

{
  "imageUrl": "https://d1z3xf5h3ibjm6.cloudfront.net/courses/abc123/600x338.jpg",
  "title": "Photography Fundamentals: Shoot Like a Pro in 1 Hour",
  "teacherName": "Marc Henriksen",
  "teacherUrl": "https://www.skillshare.com/en/user/marchenriksen",
  "duration": "1h 4m",
  "projectCount": 312,
  "studentCount": 48203,
  "rating": 0.96,
  "category": "Photography",
  "courseUrl": "https://www.skillshare.com/en/classes/photography-fundamentals/abc123",
  "scrapedAt": "2026-05-22T09:15:00.000Z"
}

✨ Why choose this Actor

• 🔍 Full catalog search - any keyword, any category on Skillshare
• 👥 Student counts included - see which courses are actually popular
• ⭐ Computed ratings - normalized from positive/total review counts
• 👤 Teacher profiles - name and direct profile URL for every instructor
• ⏱️ Duration included - filter courses by length for your research
• 💾 Multiple export formats - CSV, Excel, JSON, XML
• 🌐 Residential proxy support - reliable access at scale

📈 How it compares to alternatives

Feature	This Actor	Manual browsing	Other scrapers
Keyword search	Yes	Yes (tedious)	Varies
Student counts	Yes	Yes	Rarely
Teacher profiles	Yes	Yes	Rarely
Duration	Yes	Yes	Rarely
Computed ratings	Yes	No	No
Export to CSV/Excel	Yes	No	Sometimes
Automated pagination	Yes	No	Sometimes

🚀 How to use

1. Create a free Apify account (includes $5 credit)
2. Open the Skillshare Course Scraper on Apify Store
3. Enter your search keyword
4. Set maxItems (free users get 10 items automatically)
5. Click Save & Run
6. Download your dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML

💼 Business use cases

Competitive analysis for course creators

Before launching a new course, research what already exists. See how many students top courses have attracted, what duration they run, and what rating they hold. Use the data to position your course effectively.

EdTech market research

Track the size and growth of specific learning categories. Monitor which instructors dominate each category. Build datasets for investor research, content strategy, or platform analysis.

Instructor discovery

Find the top teachers in a specific niche (photography, UI design, Python, etc.) for partnerships, interviews, or collaboration opportunities.

SEO and content strategy

Identify which course topics drive the highest student enrollment. Use that signal to inform blog content, YouTube strategy, or your own platform's topic selection.

🔌 Automating Skillshare Scraper

• Make (formerly Integromat) - schedule weekly runs and sync results to Google Sheets
• Zapier - notify your team when new top courses appear for your tracked keywords
• Apify Scheduler - run automatic weekly catalog snapshots
• REST API - programmatically trigger runs from your research pipeline
• Webhooks - push new data directly to your database or BI tool

🌟 Beyond business use cases

Academic research

Study the economics of creator-led education, instructor retention patterns, or how course popularity correlates with topic trends.

Personal learning discovery

Find the most popular courses in a topic you want to learn. Sort by student count to find what practitioners actually recommend.

Non-profit education

Map available free and low-cost learning resources for specific skills to help underserved communities access online education.

Journalism and media

Investigate which skills are most in demand based on enrollment volume, or profile the top educators in emerging fields.

🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

You can ask any AI assistant questions like:

• "What fields does the Skillshare Scraper return?"
• "How is the rating score computed?"
• "How do I find the most popular design courses on Skillshare?"
• "Can I get the number of students enrolled in each course?"

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Do I need a Skillshare account to use this? A: No. The Actor accesses Skillshare's public API without any login or subscription.

Q: How is the rating computed? A: The rating field is calculated as positiveReviews / totalReviews, normalized to a 0-1 scale. A score of 0.96 means 96% positive reviews.

Q: What does studentCount represent? A: The total number of students who have enrolled in the course since it was published.

Q: Are all Skillshare categories available? A: Yes. You can search any topic - design, photography, business, technology, writing, lifestyle, and more.

Q: How many results can I get per search? A: Free users get up to 10. Paid users can get up to 1,000,000 (subject to Skillshare's catalog size for that query).

Q: Is the data real-time? A: Yes. Every run fetches live data from Skillshare's API.

Q: Can I search for courses in a specific language? A: The API defaults to English results. The Actor does not currently support language filtering.

Q: What is the projectCount field? A: The number of student projects submitted for the course - a good proxy for course engagement.

Q: How fast does it run? A: About 24 courses are fetched per API call. Expect a few hundred courses per minute.

Q: Can I export to Google Sheets directly? A: Yes. Use the Make or Zapier integration, or download as CSV and import manually.

🔌 Integrate with any app

Export your Skillshare dataset to:

Spreadsheets: Google Sheets, Microsoft Excel, Airtable
Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Snowflake
BI tools: Tableau, Power BI, Looker, Metabase
Automation: Make, Zapier, n8n, Pipedream
Storage: AWS S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob
Notifications: Slack, Discord, email via webhook

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⚠️ Disclaimer: This Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or associated with Skillshare. Use of this tool must comply with Skillshare's Terms of Use and applicable laws. The data collected is publicly available. ParseForge is not responsible for how collected data is used.