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Hi, Kevin. As Martin says, it is possible to automatically enroll students. Alas, this not something that I have yet mastered as it has just been easier for me to have my students enroll themselves. There are many who have used that feature, however, and I'm sure you'll get good advice from one of them soon.

I can speak to numbers 2 and 3, though. The best thing for you to do, I think, to continue your commons capabilities is to set up a separate commons course. Then you can give "teacher" powers to the student moderators just for that course only. This way they can still be in charge of creating new forums, etc., but they won't have access to grades, etc. for the academic courses. To see how this can work on a larger scale, you might want to visit www.cabweb.net, which is a consortium of tutors and students in higher ed through the University of Salford, UK. If you make a separate course for the commons, you can also then, in course settings, change the name of the "teacher" to "moderator" or "facilitator," and the other students can then be "participants" just for that course. My only caution for this solution, as I have not put it into practice myself, is that moderators would then possibly have editor capability for participant profiles in that course who also are students in other courses. Not a problem if the chosen moderators are trustworthy, and I'm assuming they would be to have obtained such a position. Perhaps someone at CABWEB can speak to this issue from experience. (Frances?)

Regarding groups: If you set up a forum for "separate groups," the actual forum summary/topic will be visible to all course members, but the discussions will be visible to group members only. For example, I teach five sections of the same course. All sections can see that there is a Romeo and Juliet forum, but only section 4 can see section 4's discussions on the play. As long as you keep the forum directions/description general enough to apply to all groups, though, you can then vary the discussion topics within the forum. Hope this makes sense. Groups can be a little complicated at first, but worthwhile once you figure out how they work.

Best,
Lesli