One of the most commonly requested public API by students has been a class/catalog API. The fact that there’s no API for class/catalog data hasn’t stopped eager student developers. They usually end up scraping data from the catalog and storing it in a database where their applications can easily access it. We are happy to say that we have started work on a solution to this common student developer problem 🙂
The API will allow developers to query classes by term, subject and course number to retrieve full class information including details, teacher, class availability and other information publicly available via the course catalog. We have started our design process in github: https://github.com/osu-mist/courses-api-design using the OpenAPI Initiative format (formerly known as Swagger). You can use the swagger editor links below to see the first draft of the design:
Let us know what you think either with a comment or pull request. This design and the first implementation of this API won’t be final. Our goal is to release a beta version of the API, and collect developer feedback.
How about other types of data in the catalog? Like major/minor/etc descriptions, options, concentrations, etc.?
John – thanks for the feedback. I created a ticket in our bug management system to address this issue. Our original goal was to provide this public data to students since it was the most requested data. I can see how major/minors, descriptions would be useful to colleges and departments. Making sure that people don’t have to write php code or be a developer to get data from our APIs into their Drupal websites is something we’re going to be working on 🙂 .