MIT OpenCourseWare Scraper

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Scrape course metadata from MIT OpenCourseWare — the free, open publication of virtually all MIT course content. The actor extracts structured data on 2,500+ courses across all MIT departments, with no authentication or proxy required.

What You Get

Each course record contains:

Modes

search (default)

Full-text search across all OCW courses by keyword.

Input:

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

byDepartment

Browse all courses in a specific MIT department.

Input:

{
"mode":"byDepartment",
"department":"Mathematics",
"maxItems":50
}

byLevel

Browse all Undergraduate or Graduate courses.

Input:

{
"mode":"byLevel",
"level":"Undergraduate",
"maxItems":100
}

byUrl

Fetch a single course by its OCW URL.

Input:

{
"mode":"byUrl",
"courseUrl":"https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-006-introduction-to-algorithms-spring-2020/"
}

Filters (all modes)

Example Output

{
"courseId":"6-867",
"title":"Machine Learning",
"department":"Electrical Engineering and Computer Science",
"level":"Graduate",
"term":"Fall 2006",
"instructors":["Prof. Tommi Jaakkola","Ali Mohammad","Rohit Singh"],
"description":"An introductory course on machine learning covering classification, regression, boosting, SVMs, and Bayesian networks.",
"topics":["Computer Science","Artificial Intelligence","Mathematics"],
"imageUrl":"https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-867-machine-learning-fall-2006/image.jpg",
"courseUrl":"https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-867-machine-learning-fall-2006/",
"hasLectureVideos":false,
"hasLectureNotes":true,
"resourceTypes":["Lecture Notes","Problem Sets","Exams"],
"sourceUrl":"https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-867-machine-learning-fall-2006/",
"scrapedAt":"2026-06-07T10:00:00+00:00",
"recordType":"course"
}

Data Source

MIT OpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) is a free and open MIT activity that publishes course materials. All data is publicly available with no authentication. The scraper uses the internal Elasticsearch API at open.mit.edu/api/v0/search/ — the same API the OCW website uses to power its search page.

FAQs

Q: Does this require login or API keys? A: No. All OCW content is freely public. No credentials needed.

Q: How many courses are available? A: MIT OCW has approximately 2,500 published courses spanning 37 departments.

Q: Can I filter by topic? A: Use mode=search with a topic keyword in searchQuery, or combine with containsKeyword for post-filter matching.

Q: What departments are available? A: All 37 MIT departments including Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Mechanical Engineering, and more. See the department input dropdown for the full list.

Q: Are lecture videos included? A: The hasLectureVideos field indicates if a course includes lecture videos. resourceTypes lists all available material types (lecture notes, problem sets, exams, etc.).

Q: How fresh is the data? A: Data is fetched live from the OCW search API on each run. MIT typically publishes new courses each semester.

Q: What is the daily test prefill? A: {"mode": "search", "searchQuery": "machine learning", "maxItems": 5} — always returns results as ML courses are among OCW's most popular.