💬 *MEGATHREAD*: Say Hello to Role Play! 💬

RyanJaress

Hey instructors! We're excited to announce our brand-new feature designed to make your courses more interactive — Role Play!

Here's how it works:

While creating or editing an English-language course, you can now add a Role Play. Simply fill out a quick form with a scenario, select a coach avatar, and choose an audio track. Learners can then practice responding as if in a real conversation — perfect for courses on communication, sales, leadership, and more!

[Note: Try it out by going to any English language course curriculum page, selecting an appropriate section, and clicking "Create new Role Play."]

Role Play allows learners to practice in a virtual sandbox before taking your skills into real-world situations. Early adopters will have Role Plays ready when we launch to learners in the coming weeks, giving your course additional appeal.

📄 Curious about all the details? Check out our Role Play FAQ for the full rundown.

💬 We'd love to hear what you think! How would you use this feature? What would make it even better? Drop your feedback in the instructor community — your input will help shape this feature's growth.

GenefaMurph976

Can't wait to see what the community creates!

PhilEbiner

Very cool, interested to see how this will work for my courses and students!

RonErez

Hi Ryan

Sounds good but there are a couple of things that are unclear to me.

I am looking at Monetization:

"18. How will learner consumption be calculated?

The consumption for Role Plays is based on how much time learners actively engage in the activity. Here’s how it works:"

Okay and where is the rest? How does it work? Monetization is important. Perhaps there could be some more explanations?

Next - creating role plays:

"1. How do instructors create Role Play?

How to create a Role Play:

1. Insert Role Play at the Right Spot in your course"

Where is the Right Spot? I don't see any tole play in my course.

I'd be happy to add role play to my courses if I understood how to do it and knowing about monetization would be nice too.

"4. Can learners access Role Plays as soon as I publish them? When can learners access Role Play?

Learners will have access to Role Play starting May 27th. In the meantime, Instructors have time to build Role Play into their courses so when learners get access, they have a vast library of quality Role Play to engage with and develop their skills. We’ll remind Instructors of the learner release as it approaches so they don’t miss out on adding this great new feature to their courses."

Okay but how does one create a Role Play?

Perhaps I am missing the obvious.

My courses focus on programming and higher math however it would be nice to find a use case of role playing in my courses.

Thanks for the new feature and looking forward to trying it out!

Ron

RyanJaress

Hey there @RonErez !

Thanks for the response. There was a glitch on our end and has been remedied. Here's a screenshot of the sections you mentioned:

Hope this helps answer some questions!

Boris035

Sounds great — hopefully, a step forward in interactive learning.

MarinaT

Hi @RonErez,

Thank you so much for your interest in our brand-new Role Play feature!🎉 This feature was just added to instructor accounts, and you should be able to find it by navigating to your course curriculum.

Click the “+ Curriculum item” button, and you’ll see Role Play listed among the available options.

For a more detailed explanation, feel free to check out our Role Play guide.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions!

PhilEbiner

Just played around creating my first role play for a new photographer meeting with a potential client for the first time… this is actually really cool! I think some students are going to absolutely love it.

FrankKane

I've created three role playing exercises already, and I have to say - this borders on magic. One of the best applications of AI I've seen, and I'm not just saying that.

It's not a fit for every topic of course, but anyone teaching management or other soft skills should be very excited by this. Most role playing exercises will be fairly quick, so I don't think we should expect a bunch of direct revenue from it - but indirectly, I think courses that incorporate it should see an overall lift in enrollments, ratings, and engagement. And, this feature should be a good selling point for Udemy overall. It's a rising tide lifts all boats kind of thing.

Sure, there's still room for improvement. If you want your AI character to sound angry for example, that's hard to achieve. But the generated conversation and the insights provided in the evaluation stage are pretty darn amazing.

MarinaT

Hi @PhilEbiner,

Yay! So happy to hear you’ve had your first hands-on experience with Role Play — and even better that you liked it!☺️

MarinaT

Hi @FrankKane,

Wow! Thank you so much for the great feedback!✨ We’ll make sure to share it with the internal team. There’s always room for growth, as you mentioned, but it’s wonderful to hear that you’re enjoying it so far and see potential in the tool 😊. Please keep us updated on how things are going, and let us know if there’s anything else you’d like to see in this feature.

ThomasMitchell

Anandrao

Good day Gents !! Has any one thought of integrating this feature with technical courses ? can we ?

Yornob

Hi everyone,

I’m really excited to share that I just published my very first Role Play using this new feature — and I have to say, it’s brilliant. As someone who's new to the instructor community, I’m grateful to be exploring this from day one.
I integrated Role Play into one of my key lessons on mental resilience, and it already feels like a big step toward creating a more immersive, skill-based experience for learners.
Kudos to the Udemy team ;) can’t wait to see how this evolves and how others will use it too.
Let’s make something great together.

Edgard (MindShift Nexus)

KeehwanKim

Wow, I can't wait to try this out! I create language learning courses and this is an awesome feature!

WilliamStewart

Hi @RyanJaress and @MarinaT, please confirm or correct the following understanding. I created a role play on a sponsor checking if a project manager understands the key drivers for project success. In the test, it appears that the AI was drawing on knowledge in general, not knowledge specifically from my course. Therefore the alignment with the content of my course was not exact, which makes things a bit difficult.

If the AI was drawing specifically on the content from my course, then the questions and answers would be perfect for a training tool that augments my course. However, if the AI is drawing on general knowledge from the Internet at large, then it does not reinforce the specific content of my course.

One of the key values of my courses is that the knowledge they teach is much more specific than general knowledge from the Internet at large. The techniques are more targeted and efficient. Superfluous steps and terminology is dispensed with. Only what really works in the most complex, professional settings, with extremely tight budget and schedule constraints, is emphasized. My course is "better" than the general knowledge on the Internet at large, and that is why the course is more valuable than, for example, just using ChatGPT or Youtube videos to get information on these same subjects.

I hope this makes sense. However, perhaps I have not set up the role play specifically enough. Please let me know - is the AI based on ChatGPT and its database from Internet knowledge in general, or is it tailored specifically to my course content?

===========================

Additional notes. Most responses on this thread seem to say this feature is great, so it clearly is helping some instructors. Therefore, please take the following comments in the constructive way they are intended, from my perspective alone.

So I ran the role play and ended it, and got feedback. The feedback was indeed very general, taken not from my course, but from the generic ChatGPT knowledge base. For example, under "Areas for improvement", the following was stated: "Consider detailing specific techniques for gathering requirements beyond general definitions, such as workshops, interviews, or surveys, to add more depth to your planning process."

Those generic techniques can be useful, but they are not from my course. My course is laser focused on specific requirements questions to ask, how to structure a requirements sentence for maximum utility, when to do less requirements work and when to do more. For me, if the AI was reinforcing the specific content of my course in the role play, it would be very useful indeed. However, as it is now, it is teaching generic material from the Internet, and therefore actually muddies the intended laser focus of my material. The suggestions it provided will be the same for any scope definition role play, for any course, from any instructor.

I suspect the same outcome would be found for any soft-skills area, such as management, leadership, communication, negotiation, etc. ChatGPT has assembled a generic knowledge base of the most common knowledge on these matters. But the best education, whether live or online, certainly education that is worth paying extra for, brings something special to the student, the very best of the best, which by definition is not available from the common knowledge.

For example, a top tier management course will provide differentially useful advice, very very specific, learned as a result of that specific instructor's hard learned experience in very specific situations. But unless there is something I am missing, which is very possible, any role play for that management course, or any other management course, would provide the same generic advice from the generic ChatGPT repository.

I don't know the compute costs required to particularize role-plays to specific courses. But I can say it would make them much more useful, at least for me.

KylePew

Wow! At first blush, this feature is pretty awesome. I've only created one role play, but so far, I'm finding the feature can add some value to my courses.

I've used the role play feature as a virtual meeting between the student and the AI avatar acting as an onboarding team member. The meeting is intended to have the AI act as the onboarding member to check in on the students' progress completing the 101 section of the course and for the student to express what they've learned and get additional feedback and encouragement on their progress.

I have 4 main sections of the course and plan on creating a role play for each section. Kind of a section/progress check-in, and encouragement on what the student is learning and to progress further to advance their skills.

Awesome feature, Thank you!

CarlosMartinez

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to chime in and say that I’ve been exploring the new Role Play feature — both as an instructor and as a learner — and I have to say, I’m genuinely impressed.

After trying it out in one of my English-language courses, I believe this tool fills a long-standing gap in the platform. For years, video has been the core format, and while powerful, it often lacked true interactivity. Role Play changes that. It finally gives students a chance to apply what they’re learning in realistic, conversational scenarios. It adds depth, engagement, and a layer of practice we’ve desperately needed.

While most of my courses are in Spanish (and a bit more quantitative), I was still able to experiment meaningfully in an English course where the feature fit naturally. I sincerely hope Udemy expands Role Play to other languages, especially Spanish, where I see massive potential for impact across a global learner base.

This is one of those moments where I truly believe Udemy got it right. When the platform takes a bold, learner-focused step like this, it deserves full recognition. So: 👏👏👏 Standing ovation from my side. I can already see how this will enhance the learning journey for thousands.

Looking forward to seeing how this evolves.

RonErez

Thanks @MarinaT and @RyanJaress you both answered my questions. I'll start experimenting and hopefully it will appear in my courses soon.

Ron

RonErez

Hi @RyanJaress

I just created my first Role Play. There does seem to be a little bug. I currently see the role play duration is 10 minutes in the preview and in the course itself, although in the role play settings I set it to 5 minutes. I also tried 3 minutes but when I join my course it still displays 10 minutes.

Thanks for the help and I'm looking forward to adding this feature to the rest of my course sections!

Ron

RonErez

Here is some more feedback. The role play is very cool. However when it creates code the code is great but when the code is read it is partially gibberish.

For example it generated:

Alex Kim

Sure! Let's say we want to create a function that returns a closure. Here's a simple example:

func makeIncrementer(incrementAmount: Int) -> () -> Int {   
var total = 0    
let incrementClosure: () -> Int = {        total += incrementAmount        return total    }   
return incrementClosure}
let incrementByTwo = makeIncrementer(incrementAmount: 2)
print(incrementByTwo()) // Output: 2print(incrementByTwo()) // Output: 4

In this code, makeIncrementer is a function that takes an incrementAmount and returns a closure. Each time you call incrementByTwo, it increases the total by the increment amount. It's really powerful for certain tasks! Does this make sense, or would you like more examples?

The code part didn't really make sense. The rest was great.

MarinaT

Hi @ThomasMitchell,

Sorry for the trouble with submitting feedback. Was it through the button shown below, located on the Role Play Planner?

I wasn’t able to replicate the issue on my end. Could you let me know if it’s working for you now, or share more details about the button you were trying to use to submit feedback?

MarinaT

Hi @RonErez,

I’m glad to hear you were able to try it out! I’m sorry, though, that the updated minutes aren’t showing in the role play preview. Could you please reach out to our Instructor Support team so they can investigate this on their end? They’ll also keep you updated once the issue is resolved. We really appreciate your patience and cooperation.

As for your feedback about the code and the example, I’ll make sure to pass it along to our internal team for future consideration as we continue improving the tool. If the team needs any additional examples, I’ll be sure to follow up with you.

Thanks again!

RonErez

Hi @MarinaT

Yes, I'd be happy to write to the Instructor Support team.

Best,

Ron

RobertBrown028

I too wondered if my course presenting a specific model for decision making could form the foundation of a role play, @WilliamStewart. I instructed the role play to use the model (harnessing the speed of thought) to achieve the goals. The simulation did use the model rather than generic information from the internet. I'll play with it more to further understand how to restrict the role play to using the material in the course.

FrankKane

A question, based on this FAQ point:

9. Will there be a restriction as to which learners can access role plays?

For Udemy Business learners, UB orgs need to have Role Play enabled for their learners to access Role Play.

Will marketplace learners see Role Play exercises at all?

SilWright

I am really excited about this feature - it will be a valuable addition to the soft skills courses that I offer. I look forward to integrating it into the course I am in the process of updating.

RyanJaress

Hey there @FrankKane!

Thank you for pointing this out. We have updated the FAQvand yes, marketplace learners can engage with it.

DanMill428

Incredible new feature for students wanting to practice real-time interviewing. Look forward to seeing what people think of it when it releases.

RonErez

I just created 37 role plays for my main course. It looks great, and I hope students will enjoy it when it's released. I have one small suggestion. It would be helpful to keep character names the same across all the role plays. For example, if I name "Character 1" Jordan Reyes in one role play, it would be nice to use that same name for the same character in other role plays too. This would make things more consistent. I used all the characters in different role plays.
Thanks for your hard work!

MarinaT

Hi @RonErez,

Thank you so much for your cooperation! The team is already working toward a fix. Wow, 37 role plays already? That’s amazing! I’m sure your learners will benefit greatly from all the effort you’ve put in.

I just wanted to double-check your feedback about the name: Are you suggesting having character names and characteristics auto-saved within an instructor’s role play tool, so you don’t have to enter them manually each time? I’ll be sure to forward your feedback to the internal team for future consideration. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts!😊