I just signed up for a Japanese 101 course at my local community college. It’s a 12-week course with 60 hours of live lectures and costs me about $200.

I wanted to keep myself sharp by learning something new, but I wanted a structured class with a sense of community to keep me motivated. I also didn’t want to break the bank.

That’s when I discovered the amazing world of California Community Colleges. I knew they offered a wide range of topics, but I was surprised to learn that over 1.9 million students were enrolled in the system last academic year.

Why Community Colleges?

• Diverse Subjects: Community colleges offer an impressive range, from traditional academics to niche skills. I even know someone who learned to swim at one! They provide learning opportunities that can be hard to find elsewhere, both in-person and online.
• Rigor and Credit: Many of these are college courses with credits, often more rigorous than typical online courses.
• Affordability: The pricing is competitive. In my local community college, California residents pay $31 per unit, and for non-residents (including international students), it’s $245 per unit.

The Challenge: Finding Courses

After browsing a few college websites, I realized each one has a unique interface. It became a bit of a scavenger hunt just to see what courses were available across the board.

Some interfaces are better than others. The California Virtual Campus does have a centralized online course repository, but it’s only helpful if you already know what you’re looking for.

For example, you can’t search for all Computer Science courses, but you can search for specific keywords like “Java.”

The Experiment: California Community Colleges Online Courses

At Class Central, we already have a catalog of around 250,000 online courses across 9,300+ subjects. So, we thought—why not experiment with cataloging California Community Colleges? If it works, we could expand to other community colleges in the U.S. and maybe even similar institutions around the world.

For this experiment, we collected information from 10 colleges (out of 116 colleges in the California System) and we were able to find 3000+ online courses.

We found courses in a variety of topics, including:

• Exploring market dynamics: microeconomics, advertising, and behavioral economics
• Learning to code: Python, Java, advanced C++, and JavaScript
• Building a greener future: sustainable design, climate action, and environmental law
• Human body in motion: kinesiology, fitness, and anatomy
• Learning new languages: Vietnamese, French, and Japanese
• Exploring society and culture: communication skills, democracy, legal analysis, anthropology, biology, and world history

All courses can be found on Class Central here. You can use the filtering options to explore topics that interest you. While we haven’t yet implemented a search feature in the user interface, you can still search by modifying the URL.

For example, to find Python courses, add “?q=python” to the end of the URL, like this:

https://www.classcentral.com/collection/california-community-colleges-online-courses?q=python

This method allows you to search for any topic by replacing “python” with your desired search term.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Course Availability: Many courses might be unavailable due to enrollment limits or because the fall semester has already started.
• Course Pages: For some courses, we couldn’t find a dedicated page, so we linked to search listing pages or the college homepage.
• Enrollment: You can’t enroll directly from our list. You’ll need to visit the college’s website and go through the application process.

I am still not familiar with the Community Colleges system, but as I (hopefully) finish my first course, it will help me understand it better and build a better search engine for California Community Colleges’ online courses.