Redmine is a trouble-ticket/problem reporting system that provides a nice way for a course's instructional team (instructor and teaching assistants) to manage responses to students.

The student interface is through email. Students email the course account, ie

cis9999@socs.uoguelph.ca

and this will open a ticket. Students get all responses through email and interact only through email.

The instructional team interface is a web interface at the following url:

https://redmine.socs.uoguelph.ca/

Staff use this interface to access open issues:

• select your project first to get to the right course
• the Issues screen indicates tickets students have sent (“open” tickets are displayed by default)
• clicking on the subject line opens the ticket

To reply to an open issue:

• click on the subject line of the ticket
• use the “reply” tool to open a reply pane and *click on the “Send note” checkbox to make the reply go to the student*

Caveats:

• don't let TAs reply to the update messages they may receive by email directly. This will mean that their reply doesn't go into the ticket log
• do use the “closed” status to get rid of tickets about conversations that are solved
• do use the “private notes” check box instead of the “send note” check box if information not to be sent to the student should be added to the ticket chain
• don't forget to use the “send note” check box to cause the student to get a reply. If this is forgotten “reply” again, copy the text from the earlier reply and use “send note”
• Instructors and TAs must first log in to Redmine before being added to a course project