The possibility for students to place comments can be used to communicate with assistants, but to make this workable for a large group of students (and comments), it is necessary to have

• the concept of a response to a comment (i.e. the answer of an assistant to a student’s question), perhaps indented like in Stackoverflow
• a label ``answered'' to communicate to other assistants that the comment/question has been dealt with
• a label ``claimed'' to communicate to other assistants that you are working on answering a specific comment
• an overview of all unanswered comments in the course

For an example in our recent course, see:
http://weblab.tudelft.nl/assignment/2331
http://weblab.tudelft.nl/assignment/2335
http://weblab.tudelft.nl/assignment/2382

Submitted by Mathijs de Weerdt on 30 October 2014 at 13:26

We improved the comment system by having overviews of comments on each level of the tree. Also this overview indicates which comments are answered or not. Both students and assistants may mark a conversation as being answered, but this also happens automatically when the last reply is not from the owner of the submission.

Other improvements are split into new issues:
https://yellowgrass.org/issue/WebLab/273
https://yellowgrass.org/issue/WebLab/274