Also interested in doing this, I've been trying to using autoenrol cohort but am a little confused by the syntax. Also... I would like to merge any academic email (ending in @*.ac.uk) into a single cohort which looks like it will be a relatively mammoth task (I think I could do it by putting in many replacement rules). Struggling with it at the moment.
I think that autoenrol would probably suffice for your aims though.