Giving Compass' Take:

• EdSurge reports on a college in Connecticut where business students get hands-on training in hydroponics at a local farm in order to gain deeper knowledge on data usage.

• In what ways can those in the higher education sector encourage programs such as this one? How would getting more practical experience boost all professional development?

• Read all about the school that provides space for hands-on STEAM learning.

It’s not every day that business students leave the classroom to work on a farm — particularly one that relies on the symbiotic relationship between living fish and plants. But one course at the University of Connecticut is testing the waters.

The course is meant to give students a deep dive into data-gathering and analysis, and it’s offered as a special topics course in the university’s major for Management Information Systems, which draws on both business and technology courses. Students travel about five miles from their Mansfield, Conn. campus to get to the farm, where they collect data about the aquaponics system and share their findings with a separate group of students who live on the farm.

The aquaponics and business experiment is a service-learning course, meaning the work students are doing is intended to tie back to the community. In this case, the farm forms that link. To craft the curriculum, Jon Moore, an instructor at University of Connecticut’s School of Business, reached out to the farm to ask what the course could do to help its existing work. In other words, Moore says, “What is the business problem and how can tech help solve it?”

The answer they fell on was collecting more data to understand the health of the ecosystem, and better allow the facility to grow fish to be eaten on campus or sold at local farmers markets.

Read the full article about the aquaponics facility teaching us about data by Sydney Johnson at EdSurge.