[rt-users] Suitability for an academic use case

[Jason Foster]

Hello all,

I am a university faculty member currently teaching 7 courses, dealing with issues for about 1000 students per year, and managing a squad of about 30 TAs.  I would _desperately_ love to use a ticketing system to manage the various requests that students (and TAs) make over the course of the year.  Having looked at the online documentation for RT, I think that it can handle this use case.  What I was hoping was to get some confirmation and suggestions from the list.  If you can help, here goes...

- We currently have an Apache web server configured to handle authentication against a central system using HTTPS and Basic auth (and we don't want to have to switch to (e.g.) OpenAuth)
- We are looking for as much automation as possible (specifically we don't want to have to create user accounts manually)
- Our users include students, TAs, and Course Instructors
- We would like students to be able to submit tickets against various items (e.g. midterm grades, assignment descriptions, etc.)
   - For items involving grades or other confidential information, only the originating student, TAs, and Course Instructors should be able to see the ticket
   - For items involving "public" information (e.g. clarification on an assignment point) all users should be able to see the ticket
- The Course Instructors would like to be able to assign responsibility for dealing with a ticket to one or more TAs
- As tickets are being dealt with, we would like to be able to attach a stream of comments, attachments, etc.
   - Comments "between" the TAs and Course Instructors as issues are resolved (e.g. discussions of why a grade was awarded) should be hidden from Students or the Requestor
   - "Public" comments (e.g. the resolution of their grade appeal request) should be visible to Students
- It would also be nice to be able to "tag" tickets to indicate the type of request being made (e.g. for an assignment there could be re-evalutation, suggestion, clarification, etc., requests)

This all feels possible in RT, and I'm hoping that it's also relatively straightforward.  The automatic registration of all users (with default status of Student) is the part that I'm most uncertain about, with the access control elements coming in second.

Thanks for your thoughts, suggestions, pointers, etc.  If it works, I'll happily spread the word among my colleagues... given these resource-constrained times, something like this would be welcomed with open arms!

Jason Foster
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Senior Lecturer in Engineering Design Education
Division of Engineering Science
Bahen Centre 2026
University of Toronto