Show HN: Search Engine for Online Courses from California Community Colleges

4 points by dhawalhs 2 days ago

I recently enrolled in a Japanese 101 course at my local California community college. It's a 12-week, 60-hour live course that costs around $200. I wanted to learn something new with more structure and rigor than on-demand online courses but without breaking the bank.

While exploring courses, I realized that navigating through different college websites with inconsistent interfaces was frustrating and time-consuming.

At Class Central, we thought it would be helpful to catalog these courses centrally. As an experiment, we've collected information from 10 out of the 116 California community colleges and aggregated over 3,000 online courses across various subjects.

While we haven't yet implemented a search feature in the user interface, you can search by modifying the URL. For example, to find Python courses, add "?q=python" to the end of the URL: https://www.classcentral.com/collection/california-community...

This is an ongoing project. Depending on the response, we're considering expanding it to include more community colleges in California and potentially other regions for Spring 2025.

I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions on how we can improve this resource.

I'm still getting familiar with the community college system, so I'd be particularly interested in hearing about your experiences with community colleges or similar systems around the world.