Academia Meets The Business World-Ryerson Retail Degree

Furniture World Magazine

In order to develop the course content for Canada's first bachelor's degree in retail management, Ryerson University believed it was essential that retailers themselves played an active part in the curriculum development process - usually reserved for university faculty only. This involvement means that students will be learning real-life competencies that retailers use every day on the job. This is true regardless of whether the student chooses to work towards the degree, a retail certificate or simply take a retail-specific course. "Many universities could not have offered to work with a corporation or a sector to develop a degree program with the kind of participatory framework we were able to offer. There would have been huge resistance," explains Phil Schalm, program director in Continuing Education at Ryerson. "We actually had retailers on our curriculum committee. That was controversial in an applied university like Ryerson; how much more so it would be in a more theoretical university!" The academic development and approval process for the degree has taken the better part of the last three years, moving from the department level, to the school, to the faculty, to the university level and finally to the Board of Governors.