What is a "Hands-on/Minds-on" activity?

I think of Hands-on/Minds-on assignments as similar to the type of learning activities I would ask students to participate in during an on-campus class session. In other words, they are activities that are designed to help you process the readings (hence the "minds-on" part), and practice the application and creation know-how and skills (the "hands-on" part) that are needed for the Culminating Projects. These activities are designed to be completed in 1-2 weeks, so they are short-term assignments.

The reason for this category of activity in IT 5130 is because one of the issues I struggle with as an online educator is finding the workload balance (I've been exploring this issue for awhile, see my article on workload reduction strategies to see where I started). I tend to feel overwhelmed by the workload in online courses, as do learners. I want the coursework to be challenging and reflect high expectations, as graduate-level coursework should. But, at the same time, I want learners to have a good, relatively stress-free experience that recognizes their full personal and professional lives. So, one of the angles I took when I started to think about redesigning this course was what I would do if I was teaching the course on-campus. Now, I don't mean to suggest that what I do on-campus is ideal or the gold-standard for comparison purposes. But, I don't tend to feel overwhelmed when teaching on-campus...so, I thought there might be something for me to explore there. It is because of this analysis that I determined to try this distinction between short-term activities (Hands-on/Minds-on) and the multi-week activities (Culminating Projects).