Coursera Course Scraper
Pricing
Pay per usage
Coursera Course Scraper
Coursera Course Scraper. Extract structured data with automatic pagination, proxy rotation, and JSON/CSV export. Pay only for results.
What does this actor do?
The Coursera Course Scraper is an Apify actor that extracts detailed information about online courses from Coursera, one of the world's leading online learning platforms. It searches for courses matching your query and returns structured data including the course name, providing university or organization, rating, enrollment count, duration, difficulty level, skills covered, pricing information, and direct URLs. The actor supports both Coursera's public catalog API and web scraping as a fallback.
Why use this actor?
Coursera offers thousands of courses from top universities and companies worldwide, but comparing courses across different topics and providers can be time-consuming. This actor automates the collection of course data, making it easy to compare offerings, analyze trends in online education, build course recommendation systems, or conduct competitive research. Whether you are an education researcher, a learning platform competitor, a corporate training manager evaluating courses for your team, or a student looking for the best-rated options, this structured dataset saves hours of manual browsing.
How does it work?
The actor first attempts to use Coursera's public catalog API to fetch course data efficiently. If the API is unavailable or returns insufficient results, it falls back to CheerioCrawler to scrape the Coursera search results page directly. The actor extracts structured data from HTML elements, JSON-LD metadata, and embedded scripts on the page. All results are deduplicated, structured, and pushed to the Apify dataset for easy export in JSON, CSV, Excel, or other formats.
Input parameters
- searchQuery (string): Search term for finding courses. Default:
"machine learning". - maxResults (integer): Maximum number of courses to return. Default:
30.
Output fields
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| courseName | Title of the course |
| provider | University or organization offering the course |
| rating | Course rating (out of 5) |
| enrollmentCount | Number of enrolled students |
| duration | Course duration or workload estimate |
| level | Difficulty level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced) |
| skills | Key skills covered in the course |
| price | Pricing information |
| url | Direct link to the course page |
Cost and performance
The actor runs with a default memory allocation of 1024 MB. When the catalog API is available, runs complete in under 30 seconds. The web scraping fallback typically takes 1-2 minutes. At the Mid PPE tier, each result costs approximately $0.00075. Running with default settings of 30 results is very cost-effective for regular monitoring.
Tips and best practices
- Use specific search queries like "deep learning specialization" or "data science with Python" for more targeted results.
- Compare courses across platforms by also using the Udemy Course Search actor for a complete view of available online learning options.
- Schedule weekly runs to track new course launches and rating changes over time.
- Filter results by the level field to find courses appropriate for your current skill level.
- Export to Google Sheets to build a comparison spreadsheet for team training decisions.
- The enrollment count is a strong indicator of course popularity and can help you identify the most proven learning resources.
