**4.2 Instructional Design of EthicApp-RP**

The design of EthicApp-RP permits the teacher conducting role-playing activities comprising an arbitrary number of phases, including both individual and collaborative work. In spite of this flexibility, activities based on EthicApp-RP will commonly follow the jigsaw Collaborative Learning Flow Pattern [56]. Under this pattern, the activity is structured based on the following successive phases:

**Prerequisites and Setup:** To create and configure an activity, the teacher must set up its configuration, see **Figure 1(a)**. For this, they indicate its title, a brief description, and provide a PDF file containing the description of the case involved. In addition, the teacher defines a set of roles involved in the case, inputs a list of actions that the different roles must hierarchically order, enters the criteria by which the actions must be ordered by the students, each of them assuming a specific role. In addition, several other parameters can be configured by the teacher, including which actions require the students' written justification, whether the next phase of the activity is individual or collaborative, the type of groups that shall be formed (i.e., 'expert groups' or 'mixed groups'), and whether students' anonymity is required.

**Individual Work:** Each student reads the case presented and issues their first ethical assessment individually, according to their role. To carry out the ethical judgment, the student has to order the presented case actions according to the

#### **Figure 1.**

*(a) Activity configuration panel, which allows the teacher to configure and start activity phases with different configuration parameters on the fly, (b) Teacher's progress dashboard, where students' and groups' progress can be seen.*

required criteria, see **Figure 2(a)**. In addition, the student may need to provide written justification for the specific ordering of one or more actions, according to how the activity had been previously configured by the teacher. While the students work on this phase, the teacher can monitor their progress through a dashboard, see **Figure 1(b)**. The dashboard displays a matrix showing the frequency with which students place actions in the different orders that are possible. In addition, the teacher may see details of the response of any individual student.

**Expert Groups:** When the teacher transitions to this phase, EthicApp-RP implicitly groups students homogeneously, i.e., forms groups comprising students with the same role. The students discuss their prior individual responses, by means of anonymous text-based chat, see **Figure 2(b)**. They may re-elaborate their responses if they choose to do so or may maintain their response unchanged as in the previous phase. As in the previous phase, the teacher is presented with a dashboard through which they can monitor student' activity. The dashboard continues to present the matrix previously described, along with students' responses, and the possibility to see the groups' conversation through chat messages.

**Mixed Groups:** After the 'Expert Groups' phase finishes, students keep their role and EthicApp-RP forms groups composed of mixed roles. The number of students per group relates to the number of roles in the activity. EthicApp-RP's grouping algorithm attempts to form groups in such way that a single representative of each role is present in each group. Students in mixed groups must defend the interest of their assigned role, while at the same time pay respect to and consider their peers' different points of view. Like in the previous phase, students can modify their response after considering their peers' points of view and arguments.

**Plenary Discussion**: After the 'Mixed Groups' phase is over, the teacher can advance to a Whole Class Discussion phase, where they can present conflicting ethical judgments from different groups to the class and ask students to express their points of view and private assessments on the case. The teacher should be careful to select contradictory or divergent judgments judiciously to stimulate a discussion that will lead to an ethical based case resolution. The objective is for students to recognize the virtues of the resolution reached in this final discussion, which can help them build ethical schemes, as well as ethical meanings that they can transfer to different cases in their future as students or professionals in the workplace.

#### **Figure 2.**

*Students' user interface, showing (a) the Individual Response phase, in which the student ranks actions and provides justification for it, (b) the 'Expert Groups' phase, in which students with the same role discuss their responses anonymously.*
