Coursera Courses and Specializations Lookup

Coursera's public catalog API exposes two kinds of listings: standalone courses and multi-course specializations. This actor pages through either catalog and returns each entry as a flat record, so you can build a course dataset without opening Coursera's site yourself.

What this actor does

• Browses either the course catalog or the specialization catalog, chosen with the mode input
• Pages through the catalog automatically, stopping once maxItems is reached or the catalog runs out of entries
• Narrows results to entries whose title or description matches a keyword
• Builds a direct coursera.org/learn/<slug> URL for every entry that has a slug
• Omits any field Coursera's catalog doesn't publish for a given entry instead of returning an empty value

Output per entry

• courseId — Coursera's internal numeric ID for the course or specialization
• title — catalog name
• slug — URL slug used to build courseUrl
• description — catalog description text, truncated to 500 characters
• workload — estimated time commitment as published by Coursera (e.g. "4-6 hours/week")
• level — difficulty level (e.g. Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced)
• courseType — Coursera's internal course-type code
• courseUrl — direct link to the course or specialization page on coursera.org
• recordType — always course
• scrapedAt — ISO 8601 timestamp of when the record was fetched

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
mode	string	courses	courses to browse the course catalog, or specializations to browse the specialization catalog
searchQuery	string	–	Keyword to narrow results by title or description
maxItems	integer	20	Maximum number of entries to return (1–200)

Example: browse courses matching a keyword

{
  "mode": "courses",
  "searchQuery": "machine learning",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: browse specializations

{
  "mode": "specializations",
  "maxItems": 15
}

Example: larger pull of general courses

{
  "mode": "courses",
  "maxItems": 150
}

Use cases

• EdTech research — build a dataset of Coursera's current course and specialization offerings for comparison against other platforms
• Content curation — find courses on a given topic to recommend or link to from a learning resource site
• Catalog monitoring — track how Coursera's workload and difficulty-level labeling changes for a topic over time
• Market analysis — compare the depth of course vs. specialization offerings across subject areas

FAQ

What's the difference between courses and specializations mode? courses returns individual Coursera courses. specializations returns Coursera's bundled multi-course programs instead — the output fields are the same, but the catalog and the records in it are different.

Does searchQuery run a real search on Coursera? It narrows the browsed catalog to entries whose title or description contains your keyword; it does not call a separate search endpoint, since Coursera's public catalog API only exposes browse-style access.

Why is description cut off at 500 characters? That's the catalog's own summary length as returned by the API; the actor doesn't fetch each course's individual page for the full-length description.

Why might a record be missing workload or level? Not every catalog entry has those fields populated on Coursera's side — the actor only includes a field when the catalog actually provides a value for it.

How current is the data? Every run queries Coursera's public catalog live, so results reflect whatever is published at run time.

Is this affiliated with Coursera? No. This is an independent tool that reads Coursera's publicly accessible catalog API and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Coursera.