Once classes do not meet in person, they are one form of virtual workgroup. One learning goal in these courses concerns using wikis and related web technology to build such workgroups, primarily for law practice.
But so long as classes meet in the traditional form, the technology remains in the background for most students most of the time. We use it to do familiar things in mostly familiar ways. The coronavirus epidemic, which requires classes to continue without meeting, increases the emphasis on the technology as an object of learning as well as a means. Using the technology to hold a class that does not meet can help to invent new ways of collaboration in law practice, which can be built out of the same moving parts.
Wikis are web pages everyone in a community can edit. For virtual organizations, every topic created is part of the community's work at the moment. It begins with questions, efforts at answers, comments and discussions. Repeatedly the topic goes through "refactoring" over time, as Q&A and discussion formats reach consensus, or are summarized for the purpose of recording what has been said and helping take the conversation further. Topics generate new topics, and also compose, over the life of the project, the knowledge-base the shared activities generated.
In a law practice—mine for example—every client is represented by a main topic page, which contains the most important information about the client, enabling a lawyer to grasp at a glance who the relevant contacts are, what we have recently done or are working on, and what the future service plan contains. The rest of the page, and the pages it links to, contain the history of the work done for the client, the privileged work-product resulting, and references to all external documents.
In a class setting, the workflow of the topics is determined by the teacher and the students collectively, assigning material, recording questions, producing collective articles that write up what has been learned. Most of the time, students will be content to let the teacher lead, using the technology to respond, but not to initiate very much. That changes now.
My experience in using this technology for virtual classes began not with an epidemic, but with a hurricane. Hurricane Sandy disrupted New York City in the fall of 2012, and trapped me and many other teachers elsewhere, with no way to return. I was in India when the hurricane hit New York, and during the week I spent trapped off-side I put together a plan and the necessary technology for "virtualizing" my courses in future. Now, in 2020, I can learn from you what will work best under current conditions and continue to adapt the tools and the method of using them.
Our course now moves into the wiki, and its associated tools, in the following patterns:
Using these five modalities—lecture audio, student essays, collective wiki pages, the student journal, and online classrooms and office hours—we have a rich variety of ways in which to keep ourselves productively engaged. Please experiment with the technology as we use it. It is all based on free software; nothing we do uses third-party data-mining services or leaks any information about your behavior to any third party. All this tech you or your law practice could run for yourself on small inexpensive computers, as I do for you here. In learning how to use this tech in ways you like, and which you find effective for your own learning, you are also discovering ways of working that will be valuable in practice.
See also the related topic WhyNotVideoConferencing.