2025 Fraud awareness training

All employees at the Department of Taxation are required to take a course on Fraud prevention and detection annually per Ohio law. 2025 was my second attempt at the course. My first attempt, 2024 Fraud Awareness training, I created shortly after joining the department. The content didn't change, so it was a fun challenge to convey the same message in a fresh and still effective manner. The time was right to finally emulate a comic-style Articulate Storyline training by Teresa Moreno that I'd been admiring for over a year.

Project Highlights

Scripting & Storyboarding

As I mentioned in the introduction, I did the majority of the legwork on crafting the learning objectives in 2024. The objectives hadn't changed in a year, so I needed to think about how to script the content and storyboard interactions in a way that felt new but still hit home for our learners.

Inductive Approach

The 2024 Fraud training approach followed a deductive training method. The course outlined objectives, and the learning path followed a sequence of defining and then practicing concepts. The practice asked learners to read a case about an employee's behaviors and actions and then drag a slider to identify those behaviors/actions as either fraud or not fraud. It was straightforward, and it got the job done.

For 2025, I wanted to flip the approach and follow a deductive route, starting with example cases and asking the learner to draw the lesson concepts from the cases. I also wanted to leverage ChatGPT to transform the cases from text-based to the comic-style I'd so admired from Teresa Moreno's Speak or Sink training. Like Moreno's training, I wanted to draw attention to the internal dialogue and rationalizing upon which most cases of workplace fraud are predicated. With this in mind, I worked with the SMEs to identify and develop all new cases that focused on small letter "f" fraud cases (e.g., time card falsification).

Noir Story

Since I knew I wanted to lean into a comic-book style training, I wrote a script with a Batman-esque noir set in the "Arch City."

The opening scene finds a fictional employee for the State Auditor's office 'burning the midnight oil' to write the 2025 State Fraud report. Distressed, he emails department heads for help in fighting fraud in state government.

From there, the story shifts to the Tax Commissioner talking to her deputies, administrators, and managers about what they are doing to help employees prevent fraudulent behaviors. This storyline creates the framework for the entire eLearning.

Look and Feel

Leaning into the comic-style, I prompted ChatGPT to create black and white, comic book-style images. The AI did a decent job of creating consistent styles, especially with the main storyline.

It was time-consuming as I prompted each and every panel, relying heavily on changing the camera angle and finding opportunities to add classic comic book onomatopoeias (e.g., Click! Whooosh! Ding!). As a nice bonus, Articulate Storyline's AI allowed me to sync each onomatopoeia with a matching sound effect. I was even able to leverage PowerPoint's page turn transition to add to the comic book feel, but it meant building the main storyline in PowerPoint and exporting the scenes as a video to import the page flip. Luckily, I was able to easily import the slides into Articulate to speed up development.

When I did run low on development time, I asked ChatGPT to create four-panel comic strips based on a dialogue rather than me acting as the director for each panel. It did a decent job, but the style was more cartoon-y than the realism of the main storyline, creating some inconsistency in the aesthetic that I didn't love. Ultimately, I was willing to sacrifice a little on the quality to save on time.

Authenticity

The comic-style look and feel lent itself easily to adding visual authenticity to the course. I received permission to feature the Tax Commissioner throughout the main storyline along with images of the Tax building and the Columbus (aka Arch City) skyline.

Heroes

While the Tax Commissioner appears as a central figure in the eLearning, my intention was actually to feature some employee personas as the heroes in the training. I created three cases that reflect employees from different departments. While I tried to create characters that looked and sounded like our employees, I feel like the cases reflect realistic decisions and struggles that employees might experience. By the end of the training, it becomes clear that the employees are the first to detect and report potential fraudulent behaviors, making them the true heroes. As the Commission notes in the final panel... Not all heroes wear capes.

Pace

I broke up the learning with several formative assessment interactions beyond the cases illustrated above. The Tax Commissioner would cue up the interactions through her discussions with the other story characters, leading into the interactions naturally.

Some interactions were simple click and reveals allowing the users to explore some of the lesson concepts more carefully.

I also used the freeform quiz options to create pick one or pick many interactions related to the department's fraud policy.

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