I’m always fascinated by the new niche search engines that great entrepreneurs are launching. And this one seems to be pretty useful if you’re looking for courses of any type, even college courses. Courseopedia is a new search engine (just launched recently in beta) that aggregates courses from many different sources: it allows you to quickly and easily find courses and view comments that others have left about it.
Courseopedia was founded in October 2008 to make it easier for students to find courses and for colleges, universities and instructors to market their courses. Abdullah Yahya is the President/Founder and Jawad Ahmad and Haseeb Qawam are the Co-Founders. Courseopedia includes online college courses, vocational schools, and even private educational opportunities like courses offered by private instructors.
Right now Courseopedia has launched with listings from schools in the State of California. They’re working on expanding it into a nationwide (United States) source of information on personal enrichment, vocational and career advancement courses.
Courseopedia currently lists about 30,000 courses from 17 California city and community colleges, including College of the Sequoias, American River College, Barstow Community College, Citrus College, College of Marin, College of the Canyons, Cosumnes River College, Cuesta College, Folsom Lake College, Foothill College, Gavilan College, Imperial Valley College, Lake Tahoe Community College. Long Beach City College, Monterey Peninsula College, Sacramento City College and Taft College. Nearly 70 more California schools will be added by mid-summer.
Courseopedia is pretty easy to use, you go to the site and enter the type of class you want…or choose a category. Put in your ZIP code and you’ll get a list of courses. Comments are enabled, so you can give your opinion on courses or see what others say about the course they have taken as well as programs and schools they have attended.
Here’s a list of the Courseopedia features:
Courses – Filter course searches in 10 master categories; narrow down the search further with subcategories, geographical preferences and advanced search options.
Programs – Find descriptions, pricing information, locations, direct links and contact info for specific programs.
Schools – Browse course and program offerings by school and easily compare school information such as estimated expenses, accreditation status and admissions requirements.
Careers – Explore career information such as required training, job outlooks, earnings expectations and related careers for more than 300 occupations.
Comments – Provide and retrieve personal evaluations of courses, programs and schools.
I took a look at the “cosmetology” category and it came up with several courses that are certainly appropriate for that category. It appears right now that Laney College is the place to work on getting your cosmetology license:
You can also see a bunch of information about each college or school offering the course, as well:
Courseopedia is also great for educators and schools who want to promote their courses. Educators and institutions can post courses one at a time use the bulk upload feature to upload the data to Courseopedia using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet template or and XML feed/data file.
While colleges typically spend a lot of money on marketing their school, most institutions leave individual course marketing to the instructors. Making sure that the courses are listed in Courseopedia will definitely help publicize the course.
So, if you offer a course, then you most likely will want to “optimize” for the Courseopedia search engine by getting your courses listed. You’ll need to create an account, but that’s free. And if you’re looking for a course, then take a look and see what you can fine.