Verified university program data, kept current for you

Once keys launch, you'll send yours as a bearer token on every request. Keys are planned to be scoped to one account and rotatable from the dashboard without downtime. The sample API ignores the header.

Every participating school publishes one file at the same address: https://<school-domain>/olf.json, served as application/json. It is plain JSON that follows schema.org (JSON-LD), so any JSON parser reads it. Consumers should also accept the earlier name /olf.jsonld: try /olf.json first, then that. There is nothing else to discover. To check a school directly, fetch that address and follow any redirect. To find schools at scale, use the directory at GET /institutions.

All responses are JSON. Prices are numbers in the stated currency and unit. Every tuition rate, fee and discount carries a source and a verifiedDate. Add ?format=json to a school's programs endpoint or to one program to get the school's own feed entries (plain JSON that follows schema.org) instead.

Large consumers load everything once, then follow changes. The nightly export (planned) is to be one gzipped JSON Lines file with a record per program. The change stream, which the sample API already serves, returns every change after a cursor, oldest first, so you can replay anything you missed.

As designed, Open Learning Feed checks each feed hourly. When a school publishes a new version, it compares it with the last one and sends a notification for each subscribed change. Your endpoint must answer with any 2xx status within 10 seconds. Failed deliveries retry with backoff for 72 hours, and every event stays available in the change stream.

Each change names the value with a path such as tuition.undergraduate.standard: the field, the program level and the rate. The same paths are used by /changes, by ?field= on the history endpoint, by subscription filters (tuition.* matches every rate) and by the embed.

Check the signature before you trust a notification. Reject events older than five minutes to block replays. For extra assurance, fetch the school's own feed and confirm the new value appears there.

If you run a content site and don't want to store data at all, you'll be able to embed a live block instead. It is designed to read Open Learning Feed each time the page loads, so the numbers on your page stay current. A WordPress plugin will wrap the same block in a shortcode.

A planned Open Learning Feed MCP server will let AI companies and agent builders connect an assistant directly to verified data. Model Context Protocol is a standard way to give an AI assistant tools it can call. Answers would then come from the school's own feed, with the source and date attached, instead of from whatever affiliate page a crawler found.

Sites that follow these rules may show the "Verified by the institution" badge. Open Learning Feed plans to audit badge sites, and a site that breaks a rule would lose the badge until it is fixed.

Each API field maps to a schema.org term or to the olf extension. Required fields must be present for a school's feed to pass validation. School feeds never include salary, career, job or occupation data, so the API doesn't return them. The table lists the main fields. tuition[] and fees[] list current and announced rates; earlier rates come from the history endpoint. Responses also carry timeToComplete, prerequisites, transferCredit.sources, accreditation[], the program's source page and updated date; each discount's percent or amount and combinable; each fee's type; and each schedule's every and description.

Errors return JSON as { "error": { "code", "message" } }. These are the codes the sample API returns today. When API keys launch, three more are planned: 401 invalid_key, 403 plan_required (for the separately priced bulk and AI access) and 429 rate_limited (wait the seconds in Retry-After).

Planned: a sandbox domain, sandbox.example.edu, will step through Example University's rate history every hour and send you the matching field.changed events, then start over. Until it launches, the sample API serves example.edu, and the notification demo above shows the events it will send.