COURSE ASSISTANT
Can I ask Lectora questions about my course?
Yes, and it will show you where the answer came from. The assistant answers from the same indexed passages the grading and the knowledge graph read. Answers drawn from that material can include numbered sources. Opening a citation shows the source and the passage it refers to. Its Canvas tools can read data from your LMS but cannot change it.
Course assistant
LEC207 · ILLUSTRATIVE
Which assumptions does the single-factor model make?
The course treats the factor loading as fixed over the estimation window and the residual as uncorrelated with the market factor.1
1 · Course handbook · passage 4, p. 11
- Does not grade
- Does not edit feedback
- Does not write to Canvas
It answers from the same material everything else reads
The assistant is not a general chatbot pointed at your course. It searches the same indexed passages the grading run reads and the knowledge graph is built from, which is what makes its answers and your grading drafts rest on the same evidence rather than two different readings of the course.
Ask which topics the final exam covers that the midterm did not, or which material a category was derived from, and the answer comes back grounded in what the course actually has indexed.
Inspect the sources behind an answer
Answers grounded in indexed course material can carry numbered citations. Open one to inspect the source and the excerpt it refers to.
Read the passage alongside the answer to check whether it supports the explanation. The citation gives you evidence to inspect.
Canvas lookup, enforced as read-only
In this version the assistant can read Canvas data but cannot change it. Its Canvas tool surface is filtered to read operations before any request is issued, so it is not a matter of instructing it politely: no prompt, role or configuration opens a write path that does not exist.
It does not grade. It does not edit feedback. It does not write to Canvas.
What Lectora does write, and who writes it
The assistant's Canvas tools being read-only is not the same as Lectora never writing to Canvas, and conflating the two would be its own kind of inaccuracy.
Lectora does write: grades on assignments you choose, grading comments, and per-question scoring on classic Canvas quizzes. Those happen as the deliberate act of an educator, under that educator's own Canvas identity, after that educator has approved what is being posted. The model reads; the person writes.
Every write operation Lectora performs is published one by one at /en/canvas-access, alongside the explicit list of things it never does: no creating courses, assignments or quizzes, and no deleting students, enrolments, courses, assignments or quizzes.
Staff only
There is no student-facing surface in Lectora. The assistant is available to signed-in staff inside the course, and sessions persist so a thread can be returned to rather than restarted.