For developers

Developer docs

CourseQuest is a project created by researchers: a free, fast university course catalog and weekly-schedule planner. It aggregates public course search data into a searchable catalog of courses and sections, including meeting days/times, rooms, instructors, seat availability, credits, and open/closed status. The web interface includes calendar export for various formats (e..g., iCal / Google / Outlook).

Use of the API is subject to our API Terms.

Not a human? See the machine-readable guide at /llms.txt.

Data model

Institution (school) → Subject → Course → Section. Each section exposes its current snapshot (status, schedule, room, seats, instructor, units) and is refreshed by periodic scrapes; prior snapshots are retained as history. Sections that disappear from a complete scrape are marked cancelled rather than deleted.

Supported schools

The set of schools grows over time. Rather than listing them here, fetch the live list:

Browse schools /api/institutions

Use a school's identifier (e.g. uri) as the inst parameter in the endpoints below. The identifiers are derived from the school's domain name, without the domain suffix. For example, the identifier for mit.edu is mit.

API reference

All endpoints are GET, need no authentication, send the CORS header Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *, and return JSON by default. Catalog search also supports format=text for plaintext and format=markdown (or the Accept: text/markdown request header) for Markdown.

GET/api/institutions

Schools that have course data loaded, with course counts.

Returns: { institutions: [{ identifier, name, courses }] }

Example

curl "https://coursequest.org/api/institutions"

Try it

GET/api/catalog/filters

Available subjects, careers, and terms for a school — useful for building queries or dropdowns.

Param	Description
inst	school identifier (the official .edu domain minus .edu; e.g. uri)

Returns: { subjects: string[], careers: string[], terms: [{ term, year }] }

Example

curl "https://coursequest.org/api/catalog/filters?inst=uri"

Try it

GET/api/catalog

Current (non-cancelled) sections for a school, with filtering and pagination. This is the main data endpoint.

Param	Description
inst	school identifier (default: uri)
term	term name (default: Fall)
year	term year (default: 2026)
q	free text over subject / number / title / class# / instructor
subject	exact subject code, e.g. BIO
career	career code, e.g. UGRD or GRAD
open	1 (or true) to return only open sections
days	comma list of weekdays, 0=Sun … 6=Sat; matches sections meeting on any of them
page	1-based page number (default: 1)
pageSize	results per page, max 100 (default: 25)
format	json (default), text, or markdown; overrides the Accept header

Returns: { total, page, pageSize, pages, results[] } — each result includes a `url` linking to its course page

Example

curl "https://coursequest.org/api/catalog?inst=uri&q=biology"

Try it

More examples

curl -H "Accept: text/markdown" "https://coursequest.org/api/catalog?inst=uri&subject=BIO"
curl "https://coursequest.org/api/catalog?inst=uri&subject=BIO&open=1&format=markdown"
curl "https://coursequest.org/api/catalog?inst=uri&q=calculus&days=1,3,5"
curl "https://coursequest.org/api/institutions?format=text"