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FeaturesCSI Teachable Replacement AppUpdated March 13, 2026

Teachable Scraper: Course Catalog Discovery

Teachable Scraper: Course Catalog Discovery

Overview

Before a full Teachable course import can begin, the platform must know which courses exist in your Teachable school. The Course Catalog Discovery step solves this by crawling the authenticated Teachable school's admin course list and producing a structured snapshot of all available courses.

This snapshot is then presented to the administrator as a selectable list, giving them full control over which courses are queued for import.

How It Works

  1. Authentication: The scraper uses your configured Teachable admin credentials to authenticate with the school's admin area.

  2. Catalog Crawl: It navigates the admin course list and enumerates every course available to the account.

  3. Snapshot: For each course discovered, the following properties are captured:

    FieldDescription
    titleThe human-readable course name as shown in the Teachable admin panel
    slugThe URL-safe identifier Teachable uses for the course
    publication_statusThe current state of the course: published, draft, or archived

  4. Admin Selection: The snapshot is surfaced in the platform's admin interface as a checklist. Administrators select one or more courses to import before triggering a full import run.

  5. Full Import (subsequent step): Only after an admin confirms their selection does the platform proceed with fetching course structures, lesson pages, content, media, and attachments.

Key Characteristics

  • Lightweight: Catalog discovery is an index-only operation. No course content, media, or lesson data is fetched or stored during this phase.
  • Non-destructive: Running catalog discovery does not modify anything in your Teachable school or in the platform.
  • Repeatable: You can re-run catalog discovery at any time to refresh the snapshot — useful if courses have been added, removed, or their publication status has changed since the last check.

Admin Workflow

1. Navigate to  Admin → Imports → Teachable
2. Click "Discover Courses"
3. Review the catalog snapshot (title, slug, publication status)
4. Select the courses you want to import
5. Click "Start Import" to begin the full import for selected courses

Notes

  • Courses with a status of archived are included in the discovery snapshot so administrators are aware of their existence, but they can be excluded from the import selection.
  • The catalog snapshot reflects the state of the Teachable school at the time discovery was run. If courses are added or changed in Teachable after discovery, re-run discovery to get an up-to-date list.
  • Catalog discovery is a prerequisite for a full import — a full import cannot be initiated without first completing a discovery run.

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