Hands-on Teaching and Learning

For those of you who may not know, I am taking a class on Structured English Immersion this month and my classmates and I started having a discussion about hands-on teaching in reference to authentic learning. (That's kind of where this post comes from)

I remember a teacher I used to work with years ago who had a poster in her classroom with this quote: "What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing." --Aristotle

...and that quote just sticks in my head even 15+ years later. She really believed that students really learn something only by doing it themselves. Lessons had to be hands-on.

Even more so, I remember being a child, coming home and telling my mom what I did in school that day and her response was, "...and how can you apply what you have learned?"

In an online environment, one of the common misconceptions that we hear regularly is that online isn't hands-on. My response when I hear that is a phrase I read in an article a few years ago, "We many be high-tech, but we are also high-touch."

How do you create athentic learning atmospheres in your online classrooms? Do you believe students learn "...by doing?" If you don't have hands-on activities in your online class, is that something you would like to have access to or create?