This is not the most beautiful mockup but it doesn't have to be.
1. Chat window. Shows scrolling text of other people speaking, can be disabled or activated to some extent by instructors; you could appoint a "student op," or have a TA do it. Ideally there would be short periods of explanation as necessary followed by open question-taking. (I figure that lecture or at least something vaguely approximating it can't be completely eliminated.)
2. Chat input window. This is where you type what you want to put into 1. which will be read and responded to by the instructor, probably verbally.
3. A bar for various options and the like, included to be somewhere fairly unobtrusive.
4. Note-taking. Auto-saves every ten or so seconds to a .rtf or similar file somewhere on the student's drives. Good for being able to jot something down on the fly, even if it may be used mostly to write down and compose questions in practice.
5. Find/replace etc. options for the word processor window.
6. Primary window; 7. secondary window
The default would have the instructor on a video camera on 6, with 7 used to display some relevant supplementary material, such as a powerpoint outline, a slide show of a more visual nature, or a whiteboard/oekaki style thing for allowing the teacher to make diagrams to answer questions on the fly. These could be reversed; for instance the teacher could appear in 7. while larger scale visuals or a movie (for a film class) appear in 6.
The teacher would have display control tools; it would be possible for them to access links provided to various content by students, or to materials they have on hand. They might be able to grant access to the "whiteboard" for students to draw an outline of what they mean, or to, for instance, indicate on a representational image which part is confusing them. Possibly there would be some sort of control mode which would go a bit like this (this being, essentially, the "prevent prankster student from drawing a penis on the whiteboard" mode):
1. Student is "called on," granted whiteboard privs
2. Student cues up image 7, which is a demonstration of the commutative property in algebra; circles sections that confuse her
3. Teacher looks at the circles and the explanation of them, authorizes display of the circled area.
4. Teacher explains issues.
In fact a "hand raise" system would probably be a good thing, perhaps with a twitter-esque field in which one can put in what you're raising your hand for -- "question re: comutative property" for instance, or "is it true geo washington was a mason?" or the like. Hand-raised students can elaborate, either aloud to the "class" or, if they prefer, directly to the teacher -- this may help those who have awkward questions or who don't want to have a speech impediment or accent picked fun of.
Ideally the teacher will then answer the question to the class as a whole (barring extremely short answers or questions to the effect of "can you go back to slide 12 for a moment").
Anyway, sessions would be recorded to disk and ideally placed up somewhere for viewing by those who couldn't make the session. I imagine everything involved in the class would be posted, excepting perhaps "Your instructor needs to go AFK for ten minutes due to a building fire drill," which could be edited over. Everything would be recorded, possibly excepting any private inquiries to the instructor; display could either be by video display of a representative "dummy screen" mode or else a literal, so to speak, log of everything that happened, which the software would simply play back. The former would probably actually be more useful.
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