Coursera-Crawler

A crawler to scrape Coursera's discussion forum.

High-level code flow is documented here.

1. Enviroment setup

   1.1 Python 2.7 (We recommend to set it up with anaconda)

   1.2 Install the packages specified in requirements.txt

      pip install -r requirements.txt
   

     For non-root users, please refer to PycURL and Non-root users to use pip to setup your environment.

     1.3 Download Phantomjs here for Windows, here for MacOS and here for Linux-64 bit( Other references), install it and add the path to 'phantomjsPath' of config.yml.

2. config.yml

   <1> "UserName" is the username for coursera account;

   <2> "Password" is the password for coursera account;

   <3> "UserId" is the ID for every account.

    First, you have to login using your coursera account on the website. Then press F12, select "Network" and choose XHR. 
    
    You can see an API link "https://www.coursera.org/api/openCourseMemberships.v1/?q=findByUser&userId=XXX", your userid is "XXX".
   

   <4> "filePath" is the path to save the data you crawled(Choose or make your preferred saving path).

   <5> "activeCoursePageNum" is the maximum pages of your "Last Active" courses you want to crawl.(When you login, you will see "My Courses", including "Last Active" and "Inactive".)

   <6> "inactiveCoursePageNum" is the maximum pages of your "Inactive" courses you want to crawl.

      <7> "phantomjsPath" is the executable file path of phantomjs.

3. CourseraScraper.py

   python CourseraScraper.py The crawled data will be saved in folders. Every course has a folder named as courseName_courseID_crawlTime(%Y_%m_%d)