On August 19, 2026, the Center for Digital Innovation in Learning (CDIL) gathered at the Waltham Woods Conference Center for its annual strategic planning retreat, “Charting the Course for the Future of Digital Learning at Boston College.” Building on conversations from previous years, the CDIL leadership team framed the day around one central question:

What should the future of digital learning at Boston College look like, and what role should CDIL play in helping to create it?

We brought colleagues from across CDIL’s functional teams together to connect our work more intentionally to Boston College’s formative education mission, explore an emerging strategic framework, and imagine how that framework could become tangible through future initiatives, partnerships, technologies, and learning experiences.

Connecting Our Work to a Shared Direction

We began the day by looking at CDIL’s evolution since 2019, when the Center was developed primarily to support online course design and delivery. Since then, our work has expanded to include a much broader portfolio of digital teaching and learning, faculty development, instructional media, learning technologies, accessibility, AI, and academic innovation. That evolution helped shape five strategic pillars developed by the CDIL leadership team to guide our work in the years ahead:

• Driving Digital Learning Excellence: What should define an exceptional, accessible, and distinctly Boston College digital learning experience?
  
• Transforming Teaching Through Academic Innovation: How can CDIL help faculty and academic programs explore new approaches to teaching, learning, credentials, modalities, and AI in ways that serve real educational needs?
  
• Empowering BC Faculty for the Future: What support will faculty need as teaching practices, student expectations, and digital tools continue to change?
  
• Amplifying BC’s Leadership in Digital Learning: How can CDIL make successful models, faculty innovation, and emerging insights more visible across Boston College and beyond?
  
• Advancing Our Learning Technology Ecosystem: How can BC’s learning technology environment become more integrated, reliable, accessible, and responsive to the needs of faculty and students?
  

Together, we intend these pillars to connect our work across course design, faculty development, instructional media, learning technologies, and academic innovation to a shared direction grounded in Boston College’s formative education mission. Our framework makes the connections across all aspects of our work more visible while keeping human-centered, formative learning at the center of how we support digital education at BC.

Our strategy is already being enacted every day through our partnerships with BC’s innovative and creative faculty. The leadership team presented on how each functional area s is currently advancing strategic initiatives in service of the five pillars. Each presentation helped highlight how initiatives across CDIL’s teams are already advancing formative education in digital learning at BC. Examples included:

• Expanded approaches to collecting and using faculty and student feedback to drive course and program improvement.
  
• Digital accessibility efforts designed to make learning experiences more inclusive from the start.
  
• Faculty development focused on AI, authentic assessment, and thoughtful experimentation with emerging technologies.
  
• New digital microcredential initiatives and other forms of academic innovation.
  
• Learning technology integrations and cross-functional projects that connect expertise from across CDIL.
  

Keeping People at the Center

Across conversations ranging from AI and microcredentials to accessibility, faculty development, and the learning technology ecosystem, we continually circled around one guiding theme:

the future of digital learning at Boston College should remain fundamentally human-centered.

Just as importantly, our planned breakout sessions kept returning to questions of formation.

• What does it mean to support faculty as they adapt their teaching in a period of rapid technological change?
  
• What kinds of learning experiences help students develop as whole people when technology is increasingly present in nearly every part of their academic lives?
  

The collaborative breakout work also helped us refine what the strategic pillars might mean in practice. At the breakout “station” focused on Driving Digital Learning Excellence, for example, one group connected accessibility directly to BC’s commitment to educating the whole person and captured the idea with a phrase that stayed with us: “Whole person means every person.” Other groups described excellence in terms of care, authenticity, relationships, and a clearer expression of what formative education should look like in practice within digital environments, in both course design and online learning facilitation.

Similar themes emerged in conversations about AI. Teams explored how CDIL might help faculty use AI in ways that support authentic teaching and learning, meaningful outcomes development, meaning-making, and support of student formation in online and hybrid learning contexts. They also considered how the faculty role may continue to evolve as AI makes information and content easier to generate. In that environment, educators remain essential as context-setters, mentors, facilitators, disciplinary and industry experts, and the people who help students make sense of what they are learning and why it matters.

Regardless of the topic, our retreat groups came back to the idea that pedagogy and relationships should drive technology choices, not the other way around. Our goal is to always use technology in ways that strengthen student-to-faculty and student-to-student relationships while supporting the reflective and relational dimensions of a Boston College education.

From Possibilities to Practice

As we moved from vision to action, CDIL staff identified several ways to deepen our center’s impact. One area centered on stronger cultures of co-design, including more opportunities for faculty, students, and CDIL staff to shape learning experiences together. Another focused on faculty development, with ideas ranging from coaching models and just-in-time resources to more sustained communities where faculty can learn from one another and from CDIL expertise.

Staff also explored opportunities for more experiential and career-connected digital learning, fostering greater visibility for successful teaching innovations, and a more integrated learning technology environment that makes it easier for faculty to navigate a growing ecosystem of tools. These ideas reflected a broader theme from the day: innovation should help BC create more meaningful learning experiences, not simply add more technology for the sake of “innovation”.

Our conversations also highlighted how CDIL operates as more than a service center for faculty. We see ourselves as forging connections across BC, co-designing impactful digital learning experiences with faculty, and serving as a source of expertise in effective online and hybrid learning practices. Because our teams work across schools, programs, and disciplines, we are also in a position to identify patterns of strong learning design, connect colleagues who may be solving similar problems, and bring emerging possibilities into broader conversations about technology-empowered teaching and learning at BC.

We ended the day by asking staff to identify the ideas they believed could have the greatest impact for Boston College, the initiatives they would personally be interested in helping to advance, and the areas that needed deeper exploration. Because CDIL values collaborative strategy-making and wants the framework to remain responsive to the people doing the work, the leadership team will now synthesize the ideas generated during the retreat and bring them back to the full staff for continued development. Throughout the 2026–27 academic year, staff will have opportunities to form cross-functional groups and turn promising ideas into strategic initiatives aligned with the five pillars.

Ultimately, the CDIL annual retreat was about charting a course, but the destination wasn’t a singular technology, program, or initiative. Instead, the day’s purpose was to create a clearer picture of the kind of digital learning environment CDIL wants to help Boston College cultivate.

That environment should be innovative and adaptable enough to respond to the rapidly shifting higher education landscape and the ever-evolving world of work our graduates will enter. At the same time, we recognize that BC’s digital learning vision should remain unmistakably grounded in cura personalis, care for the whole person. Digital learning at Boston College must remain deeply grounded in people, relationships, transformational learning, and the University’s formative education mission, and CDIL’s annual retreat reinvigorated our commitment to continuing our exploration of new ways to foster digital learning innovation with that mission at the forefront of our efforts.