Lectern

Terms

These terms apply to the Lectern extension, the website lectern.chat and every private link they issue. You accept them when you tick the agreement box and click Agree and connect in the extension, or when you accept them on Lectern's app authorization page. The privacy policy explains the data practices tied to those actions.

What Lectern is

Lectern is a free tool that lets a student read their own Brightspace courses through a chat app of their choice. It uses the Brightspace session the student's browser holds, reads with it from Lectern's server when the student's chat app asks, and keeps that session valid on a schedule while the connection exists. Its tools read; they do not submit work, post messages or edit grades. Signing in, renewing and ordinary access can still change session state and appear in your school's activity records. Lectern is the project name used by the individual who operates this service, called the Operator in these terms; these terms are between you and the Operator. Lectern is not affiliated with, endorsed by or approved by D2L Corporation, any school, Anthropic, OpenAI or Google. Brightspace is a trademark of D2L Corporation; Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are trademarks of their owners.

Who may use it

  • You must be at least 18 years old and have reached the age of majority where you live.
  • You must be a student, and you may connect only a student account that is yours. Connecting someone else's account, or a shared, staff or institutional account, is not allowed.
  • You must not connect or use Lectern if you live in, or are in, the European Union, the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Quebec. Lectern also refuses school addresses associated with those regions; an address passing that check does not make you eligible.

Your school and D2L

Lectern's server accesses Brightspace with credentials obtained from your browser. It makes requests for the app you connect and scheduled requests to maintain the connection. Your authorization does not replace permission required from your school or from D2L. The agreements that govern your Brightspace account, including D2L's end user licence agreement, your school's acceptable-use policy and your sign-in provider's terms, place restrictions on automated access, on extraction by a program and on letting anyone else use your account. Read the ones that apply to you and decide whether they permit what Lectern does; only you can make that determination for your own account, and Lectern makes no representation about it. Lectern has not obtained permission from your school or from D2L. Do not connect unless the agreements governing your account permit Lectern's automated access, credential transfer and session renewal, or you have obtained the required written permission. Being able to sign in does not establish that permission. If permission is absent, uncertain, withdrawn or disputed, do not connect, or stop using Lectern and delete the connection, and tell hello@lectern.chat of any objection or restriction from your school, D2L or your sign-in provider. You are responsible for your own violations: a warning, loss of access, a disciplinary finding, an academic penalty, or a claim by D2L or your school.

What you agree not to do

  • Disrupt, overload, scan for vulnerabilities in, or attack Brightspace, a school's systems, a sign-in provider, a connected app or Lectern; bypass access controls, account restrictions or rate limits; continue access after permission has been withdrawn; or use another account, connection or network address to evade a restriction.
  • Disclose your private link anywhere except Lectern's own pages and the connector settings of a chat app you use yourself, or use a link that is not yours.
  • Use Lectern to collect or disclose another person's information without the permission or legal authority that use requires, even if the information is visible in your courses, or to compile information about others into a dataset.
  • Use Lectern for anything that breaks the law where you are, or for academic dishonesty as your school defines it.
  • Use the service through anything other than the Lectern extension and an MCP client of your own, or probe it for weaknesses other than to report them to hello@lectern.chat.

You authorize Lectern to process and transmit only information you are entitled to provide for the requested function. Nothing here transfers ownership of course materials or grants rights that belong to your school, your instructors or other students.

No promises

To the extent permitted by law, Lectern is provided as is and as available, without implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement. Lectern does not guarantee uninterrupted availability or accurate or complete results. What a chat app says about your courses is that app's reading of what Brightspace returned, and it can be wrong, late or incomplete: verify deadlines, grades, announcements and submission status in Brightspace itself, which is the only record that counts. Course content reaches your chat app as text written by other people, and a post or a file written to steer a chat app could influence its answer; Lectern marks that text as course data, and the chat app's own safeguards do the rest. The service may change, pause or end at any time without notice. Nothing here excludes a warranty or obligation that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Operator is not liable to you for any indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary or punitive damages arising from or connected to Lectern or these terms, including loss of data, loss of access to Brightspace or to a school, academic or disciplinary consequences, loss of opportunity and the cost of substitute services, whether in contract, tort, negligence, statute or otherwise, and even if advised of the possibility. For every other claim, the Operator's total liability to you for all claims together is limited to the amount you paid for Lectern, which is nothing, or where the law does not allow that limit, to the smallest amount the law allows. These exclusions and limits do not apply to fraud, wilful misconduct or gross negligence, or to liability that the applicable law does not permit to be excluded or limited, and where a jurisdiction does not permit an exclusion they apply to the greatest extent it does permit.

Your indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, you will defend, indemnify and hold harmless the Operator from every third-party claim, demand, loss, liability, damage, cost and expense, including reasonable legal fees, to the extent it arises from your unlawful conduct, your breach of these terms, or your breach of a rule or agreement that binds you, including a claim brought by your school, by D2L Corporation, by a chat app provider, or by another person whose information appeared in your courses. This does not cover the Operator's own fraud, wilful misconduct or gross negligence. The Operator will notify you of such a claim promptly and take reasonable steps to limit the loss, and no settlement will impose an admission, a non-monetary obligation or a payment on you without your written agreement.

Ending it

You may stop using Lectern at any time. To end the connection, choose Forget in the extension and confirm that the deletion succeeded; removing the extension attempts the deletion but can fail, as the privacy policy explains. The Operator may suspend or discontinue access, including immediately for security, legal or operational reasons, refuse any Brightspace site, or shut the service down. If a school, a sign-in provider or D2L objects in writing to Lectern's access, the Operator stops serving that Brightspace site and deletes the connections for it; send such an objection to hello@lectern.chat. Ending access does not remove rights or liabilities that already arose. The liability limits, the dispute provisions and the indemnity for conduct before the end survive, to the extent permitted by law.

Changes

Each version of these terms has a version date, shown at the foot of this page. When they change materially, the new version is posted here and the Lectern extension asks you to accept it. The version you accepted is the one recorded on your connection and the one that applies to it; using an existing connection after a change is not treated as acceptance of the new version. Changes apply from acceptance and do not alter a claim that arose before it. If you do not want the new version, delete the connection from the Lectern icon.

Law

The laws of the State of New York, United States, govern these terms and every dispute connected to Lectern, except that this choice does not take away protections that the applicable law makes mandatory. To the extent permitted by law, a claim between you and the Operator about Lectern must be started within one year after the claimant knew or reasonably should have known the facts giving rise to it; this does not shorten a period the law does not allow to be shortened. If a provision is unenforceable, it is severed to the extent necessary and the rest continues unless the law requires otherwise. These terms and the privacy policy are the entire agreement between you and the Operator about Lectern. Failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it.

Where disputes go

You and the Operator agree that the state and federal courts sitting in New York County, New York have exclusive jurisdiction over every dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to Lectern, the extension, the website, the server, these terms or the privacy policy, and each of you consents to the personal jurisdiction of those courts and waives any objection to venue or to the forum being inconvenient. Either party may instead bring an eligible individual claim in a small claims court that has jurisdiction over it. Nothing here restricts a complaint to a regulator, or a proceeding that the applicable law does not allow to be waived.

No class actions, no jury

To the fullest extent permitted by law, you and the Operator each waive the right to a trial by jury and the right to bring or take part in any class, collective, consolidated, representative or private attorney general action against the other. Claims are brought and resolved individually. If a court finds this waiver unenforceable for a particular claim or request for relief, that claim or request, and only it, proceeds without this waiver, and the rest of this section still applies.

Contact

Send support requests and notices under these terms to hello@lectern.chat. That address does not replace a method of service or notice that the applicable law requires or permits.

Version 2026-09-13.2.