DESIGNING TOGETHER: A ROLE-PLAYING TRAINING INTERVENTION FOR E-LEARNING TEAMS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

Designing digital and blended learning in higher education increasingly relies on collaborative instructional design processes supported by multidisciplinary e-learning teams. However, the practices, roles, and decision-making dynamics that characterize these teams often remain implicit. This paper presents a descriptive and exploratory case study of an experiential training intervention designed to simulate e-learning team practices through role playing. The intervention was implemented within a university faculty development program and conceived as a simulation-based learning experience articulated into three phases: (i) an introductory scenario framing digital and blended learning, (ii) a collaborative role-playing activity supported by role-specific design kits, (iii) and a structured debriefing. Participants worked in small groups, assuming simulated professional roles—specifically, content expert, instructional designer, and technical specialist—and collaboratively designed a micro digital learning activity. With a design-based perspective, the study documents the teaching intervention, the structure and function of the role kits as instructional design tools, with the aim to propose a transferable training initiative that uses role playing to make instructional design processes, roles, and interdependencies within e-learning teams explicit and negotiable. The role-playing kits represent a key element of originality of the initiative and constitute a tool that can be shared and adopted by universities and other institutions to support faculty development, including the onboarding of new members of e-learning teams and the transition toward more collaborative, instructional design-informed workflows.