Course Agent for the Volkshochschulen
Ten thousand adult education courses in Berlin, searchable in natural language.
The twelve Berlin Volkshochschulen run about 10,000 courses at any one time: languages, crafts, health, IT, integration courses. The whole catalogue is published as open data and regenerated every hour, which is a better starting point than most public course data gives you.
What I built sits on top of it. You describe your situation, and the agent works out what fits.
What it does
Say you’ve just moved to Berlin, you want to learn German, and you work during the day. You can write exactly that. The agent searches the catalogue for what matches and comes back with courses and the reason each one fits.
It advises as much as it searches. If you don’t know which level to start at, or whether an integration course applies to you, it asks about that before recommending anything.
And it replies in the language you write in. About 1,140 of the Berlin courses are German as a foreign language and another 672 are integration courses, so a good share of the people looking are at the very beginning of their German.
Underneath it’s retrieval-augmented generation over the course data, with a second lookup against the live system for the things that change daily, such as whether a course still has free places.
You can try it out here: kursspot.vercel.app.
Where it stands
It runs on the Berlin catalogue, which the Servicezentrum der Berliner Volkshochschulen publishes under a CC-BY licence. The project is currently in coordination with them.