**2. Research context**

With the intent of fostering the development of ethics skills in higher education, in the period 2018–2019 the present authors developed a collaborative web application called EthicApp, compatible with any current desktop computer or mobile device, including smartphones. EthicApp supports teachers in preparing and executing pedagogical tasks involving students' ethical discernment and reflection around ethical cases, in either face-to-face or online settings [32, 33]. Our early research with EthicApp focused on promoting higher level thinking processes, including reflection, argumentation, ethical discernment and moral reasoning. In addition, with EthicApp we strove to provide students equal opportunities for participation in ethics classes.

The first version of EthicApp consisted of a pedagogical flow comprising successive phases in which the students conduct ethical judgments individually, then in a small groups. The design sought that students express their judgments without inhibitions, so interactions among students were kept anonymous, even while working collaboratively. On the other hand, the teacher could monitor the activity and easily notice the groups of students presenting the greatest differences in the ethical evaluation of the case discussed. Lastly, the teacher could engage the entire class group in a discussion, for reflection on divergent ethical judgments found, and encourage students to further reason, argue and debate considering different points of view.

We conducted an initial pilot study of EthicApp, reported in [32], involving 35 Civil Engineering students from the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Universidad de los Andes, Santiago, Chile. The analysis of students' behavior revealed that ethical judgments tend to be stable in the successive phases of the activity. However, it was observed that judgments tended to change more in groups where greater discussion occurred, and that the converse also happened. For this reason, we then considered that a desirable modification to the activity would consist in automating group composition, in such way that students with different views are brought together. Heterogeneous student grouping was thus hypothesized to increase students' interest in discussing the ethical case, and therefore, fostering a space where students have greater opportunity of modifying their ethical judgments as a result of argumentative and reflective processes in a social setting.

In [33], an experimental study was conducted with EthicApp in online mode, involving a cohort of 72 Civil Engineering students in the Professional Ethics Seminar course, in the same institution as in [32]. Greater chat interactions were observed among group peers in the heterogeneous grouping condition than in the random condition. In addition, it was identified, both in the heterogeneous and random grouping conditions, that the more chat messages were exchanged among the students, the more they produced argumentative discourse. Highly significant correlations were found among these variables. Lastly, it was found that male and female students benefit equally from the learning opportunities that are possible with the heterogeneous equally under the heterogeneous grouping condition, as no interaction effects were found among the quantity of chat message exchanges and gender.

In this chapter, we report on the development of EthicApp-RP, a social platform aimed at higher education settings, for fostering reflection and moral reasoning around ethical cases through a role-playing activity. In the following sections, we present the theoretical underpinnings of this research, the design principles of EthicApp-RP, the description of its instructional design, and a pilot study with business students to attest its technical and pedagogical usability, as well its effectiveness at fulfilling desirable qualities of role-playing activities in ethics education.
