I thought that this (see all topics in a forum) is what you might mean gets messy. In my course, when I have 6 groups and 8 topics, I see 48 forum discussions going on. However, this is what is really happing, there really are 48 different discussions, and each discussion might be discussing different perspectives. Right now, I do have a way to say "Show me only group X."
So what we have are two opposing problems. If you want to have smaller discussion groups that make students discussions more focused, then you end up with the instructor needing to participate in more discussion topics and grade. If you put students into larger groups, discussion quality can go down, but grading becomes easier.
I don't see any good way to resolve these opposing issues.
But the same issues are there even in physical course discussions. If a large lecture (let's say 300) has smaller discussion groups (let's say 20), then what does the instructor do? Does the instructor visit each break-out discussion group?
For picking which group gets which topics, I did come across one method that could work. This is for a standalone product (Tableau). I am not sure if this is easy to do in html.
