UF Counseling and Wellness Center: Interactive Training on Helping At Risk Students

The UF Counseling and Wellness Center has adopted an training to assist folks working with students in better identifying and in referring students to support services on campus. There’s more about this on the UF Counseling and Wellness Center website, including a link to the training: http://www.counseling.ufl.edu/cwc/kognito-at-risk.aspx
The training is really quite good. It’s informative, well designed, and well structured. It often seems, perhaps only to me, that lessons from game design aren’t well-utilized for these sorts of trainings, but this training does a really good job of implementing aspects that work without trying to gamify the experience in any way. It simply has a very good (good in terms of constructive and well thought out for the learning goals and objectives) application of elements of game design and interactive design more generally in service of the learning goals. Part of this includes quality visual and interface design, quality voice acting, and thoughtful design of the interface to supply lots of information in a manner that’s usable.
I’m always happy to see trainings like these because it’s important for people to know about the resources on every campus for students (and everyone else) to help ensure a healthy campus. I’m especially happy to see these when they’re done well, and it seems like that’s become more and more often the case.
It’s not clear to me if this is a result of greater knowledge and awareness of game design and instructional design principles with more people educated in these areas both formally and as users, if this reflects a growing emphasis on learning objectives integrated into training and simulations, if this means my limited experiences have simply shifted from a random sampling of examples that are now better examples, or something else. Whatever the case may be, it’s very nice to see productive, well-designed training for needed topics that help people in promoting services like on-campus counseling services.