Find Free Udemy Courses with Google Sheets and the Udemy API

CodeCanyon · May 2

Whether you are looking to learn a programming language, enhance your Microsoft Excel skills, or acquire knowledge in Machine Learning, Udemy probably has a video course for you. Udemy courses are usually affordable, there are no subscription fee and you can learn at your own pace.

Free Udemy Courses on Programming

While most video tutorials on Udemy require payment, the website also offers some of their highly-rated courses for free. I’ve prepared a Google Sheet that lists all the free programming courses currently available on Udemy. The spreadsheet is updated automatically every few hours. You can also access the web version for easy browsing.

✨ You may use the search function of the browser (Ctrl + F) to find courses for a specific programming language or topic. The courses are sorted by popularity.

There’s no secret sauce. Udemy has an developer API that provides access to all the course data available on the website, including user ratings, number of students who have taken the course, duration, preview video lectures, and more.

Use the Udemy API with Google Sheets

The Udemy API is free to use but requires authentication. You can generate the credentials for your Udemy account and then use the /courses endpoint to fetch the list of free courses.

const parseCourseData_ = (courses) =>
  courses
    .filter(
      ({ is_paid, primary_category }) =>
        is_paid === false && ['Development', 'IT & Software'].includes(primary_category.title)
      // We are primarily interested in programming courses on Udemy
    )
    .map((e) => [
      `=IMAGE("${e.image_240x135}")`,
      `=HYPERLINK("https://www.udemy.com${e.url}";"${e.title}")`,
      e.visible_instructors.map(({ display_name }) => display_name).join(', '),
      e.num_subscribers,
      Math.round(e.avg_rating * 100) / 100,
      e.num_reviews,
      e.content_info_short,
      e.num_lectures,
      new Date(e.last_update_date)
    ]);

const listUdemyCoursesGoneFree = () => {
  // Put your Udemy credentials here
  const CLIENT_ID = '';
  const CLIENT_SECRET = '';

  const params = {
    page: 1,
    page_size: 100,
    is_paid: false,
    'fields[course]': '@all'
  };

  const query = Object.entries(params)
    .map(([key, value]) => `${key}=${encodeURIComponent(value)}`)
    .join('&');

  const apiUrl = `https://www.udemy.com/api-2.0/courses/?${query}`;
  const bearer = Utilities.base64Encode(`${CLIENT_ID}:${CLIENT_SECRET}`);
  const options = {
    muteHttpExceptions: true,
    headers: {
      Authorization: `Basic ${bearer}`
    }
  };

  const courses = [];

  do {
    const response = UrlFetchApp.fetch(apiUrl, options);
    const { results = [], next } = JSON.parse(response);
    courses.push(...parseCourseData_(results));
    url = next;
  } while (url && courses.length < 500);

  const ss = SpreadsheetApp.getActiveSpreadsheet();
  const [sheet] = ss.getSheets();
  sheet.getRange(2, 1, sheet.getLastRow(), sheet.getLastColumn()).clearContent();
  sheet.getRange(2, 1, courses.length, courses[0].length).setValues(courses);
};

We use the UrlFetch service of Google Scripts to fetch the data from the Udemy API and the data is then parsed and inserted into the Google Sheet. The course thumbnail image is rendered using the IMAGE formula and the course title is linked to the Udemy website using the HYPERLINK formula.