Redmine

I'm a bit confused here....

Can't the first 3 be met by the project guide (typically a project manager in the work place), commenting/managing tickets?

Providing remarks on various project activities.

Project guide just comments.

Giving directions to the team members

Project guide comments on the task their directing or creates a new parent task (which the team makers can break into smaller sub-tasks of the task is large and delegate those parts to individual people).

Making announcements to projects/ team members

Project guide posts to project news.

Grading team members/ projects either periodically or at the end of project.

Could add a custom field to versions, a version will have a due date, the students can use the roadmap to check their progress, a custom field on versions can show grades, and you can extend Redmine or write your own SQL to dump all grades to some document for easy processing for teachers. Don't allow students to edit versions, only view.

Also, you may just use versions as a tool to benchmark your students, but keep grades outside of Redmine (probably best if you need a decent amount of flexibility, being as you'll likely be grading students by various other metrics than raw project input).

What do you think?

No, I suggest adding such features or develop plug-ins?

Also because these are very specific to your needs: plug-ins would work best (and don't have to get by Jean-Philippe, which will require extensive testing and such). Most of what you want should be able to be handled by Redmine itself out of the box with some tweaks using it's custom field tools. The biggest thing you may want is custom reporting for your teachers.

Thanks for your reply.

Your suggestions are certainly useful.

However, by a more natural role, I mean, can we have a Project Guide who can perform all these tasks without actually becoming a member of the project team?

Thanks again.