Privacy & Student Data

When you build or adopt a course we keep your account details (name, email, institution if you give it), the course you assemble on the timeline, the materials you upload or write, your publishing preferences, and the requests you make for files, previews and quotes.

Uploaded syllabi, notes and manuscripts are used to build your course. They are not added to the open catalog unless you ask us to publish them, and they are not shared with other instructors.

Reading the open textbook needs no account. It collects anonymous page analytics and, where allowed, ad-measurement cookies (see Cookies). Hosted homework needs an account or an LMS launch so that attempts can be recorded and returned to the right person.

For students we hold: the identity the course or LMS gives us, homework and quiz attempts, scores and feedback, the Personal Science Notebook if the student uses it, and any AI-assistant conversations the student chooses to have. We do not build advertising profiles and we do not sell student information.

Learners under 13 use CourseHouse only through a school. Our terms and the children's privacy notice available from support set out the school-consent basis for that use.

Courses run inside Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard and other LMSs over LTI. A launch sends us the course context, the assignment being opened, the launching user's role and an identifier for that user, and — where the institution enables it — a name and email so feedback can be delivered.

• We request the minimum LTI claims the assignment needs; roster-wide data is not pulled.
• Grades return to the LMS gradebook only for the assignment that was launched.
• Institutions can ask us to run without names and emails; feedback then stays inside the course.

Every attempt is stored with its answers, the deterministic checks that scored it, the feedback shown, and timestamps. Instructors see their own course's attempts; students see their own. Attempt records are education records: where an institution is the customer, we process them under its instructions.

Homework and quiz item banks are hosted and are not distributed as files, which is also how we keep them from circulating.

The notebook is the learner's own record. It is free to students while they are enrolled through a school, stays readable to the student after the course ends, and is not visible to instructors unless the student shares a page. Instructors can set carry-over preferences for a course; they cannot read private entries.

Some features send text to a third-party model provider (currently OpenAI or Anthropic, chosen per feature or per user preference) to produce a hint, an explanation or a draft. We send what the feature needs and no more, under API terms that do not permit the provider to train on the data.

• Student-facing AI is optional and can be switched off per course by the instructor; the course keeps working.
• Deterministic grading does not use an LLM. AI may explain a result; it does not decide it.
• We do not use student work to train models by default. See our AI Principles.

We measure how the site and courses are used in aggregate — which pages are read, where students get stuck, how long assignments take — to improve the materials, and how visitors find us — which search, post or ad led to a visit, a signup or a purchase. Course-level analytics shown to instructors are about the course, not about individual behavior outside it. Raw visit analytics are kept for 6 months; after that only aggregate counts are kept. Analytics consent can be changed from the account page on CourseHouse or ChemIllusion, and the choice applies to both.

Anonymous visitors can read the open textbook, use the course builder and try the assistant for a few turns without an account. We set a session cookie for that.

We and Google also use cookies to measure how visitors find and use the site, including whether a visit came from one of our Google ads (Google Analytics and Google Ads conversion measurement). We don't use them for ad targeting or advertising profiles, and never on student course pages or LMS launches. Visitors in the EU, EEA, UK, Switzerland and California are asked first; everyone else can turn them off from the account page or the privacy page, and a browser's Global Privacy Control signal turns off the ad-measurement cookies.

• Account, course and notebook data are kept while the account is active.
• When an account is deleted, its data is removed from our systems within 30 days unless the law requires longer.
• Homework attempts and grades for an institutional course are kept for the term the institution specifies in its agreement, then deleted or returned.
• AI conversations are kept with the account and deleted with it; providers are held to no-training, limited-retention API terms.
• Raw visit analytics (pages viewed, referring site, campaign tags) are kept for 6 months, then reduced to aggregate counts with no identifiers.
• Raw NMR datasets uploaded on the free plan are deleted 30 days after they were last processed; paid plans keep them while the account is active. Files you have exported or saved to your notebook are not affected.

Students and instructors can request export or deletion from the account page or by contacting support.

We use hosting and database providers, an email delivery provider, Stripe for payments (we never see full card numbers), and the AI model providers named above. Each processes data only to provide its service to us. A current list is available to institutions on request.

CourseHouse is designed to support institutions' FERPA obligations: we act as a service provider under the institution's direct control, use education records only for the approved educational purpose, and do not redisclose them. This is a design commitment, not a government certification.

Institutions can request our FERPA-aligned data protection addendum, subprocessor list and deletion runbook through support before adopting a course.

You can access, export, correct or delete your data, and object to analytics. Use the account page or the contact page. We answer privacy requests within 30 days.