annual fraud Awareness training

All Department of Taxation employees are required to take an annual fraud awareness training. I was asked to refresh the training from its current state - a 9-minute video - to a self-paced eLearning. The end product was created in Articulate Storyline and incorporated multiple cases that I built with project SMEs to ensure they reflected common questions and authentic situations unique to the department.

Project Highlights

Introduction Video

It was fun but challenging to create an opening video that conveyed the importance of fraud training while keeping the tone light and friendly. I was especially proud of the binoculars that appear around 21 seconds. I created them in PowerPoint and imported them into Vyond to overlay the silhouette figures. Still, the video portrays the employees as the actors in preventing fraud rather than villans who need to be surveilled. The video told employees what to expect from the training and set the tone.

Training Content

I started developing the course by deconstructing the old course. I watched the previous year's training and transcribed it so that I could reverse-engineer the topics it covered. Once that was done, I was able to see what the training was attempting to teach. With SME validation and refinement, I used Backward Design (see an early draft chart below) to see that the goal was to teach employees what fraud is, how to detect it, and once detected, to report it. However, the training was lacking any opportunity for employees to practice these behaviors. My goal, then, was to present the didactic content (i.e., department policies and procedures) along with realistic cases for practice and formative assessment.

Didactic Content

The content was complex and dense with definitions coming from policies written in legalese. To reduce the intrinsic load, I first chunked the content into sequences that supported a gradual development of concepts. I added simple graphics and animations germane to the content. I relied on AI-generated narration along with on-screen text to lend emphasis to important concepts. Lastly, I created cohesive vector graphics to illustrate main ideas.

Trivia Questions

One of the source materials provided by the project SMEs was the 2024 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners report. The data visualization found in this report struck me as interesting and highly appealing. I wanted to incorporate the look and feel of the statistics into the training, though the content knowledge was only secondary to the behaviors we wanted to the training to accomplish. So, I created and interspersed five ACFE trivia questions throughout the training. Employees were told the questions were low-stakes and encouraged to guess. They received feedback about the correct answer. The questions served to break up the dense didactic content and emphasize the importance of fraud awareness and training.

Formative Assessment Cases

Lastly, I worked with the SMEs to write 18 different fraud cases. The cases illustrated three types of fraud common to our department (i.e., time theft, data browsing, and money and asset stealing). We wrote five cases for each category. The practice cases were presented directly after learners reviewed definitions related to each category. I developed a slider that employees used to determine if the case constituted fraudulent behavior. There were three final and more comprehensive cases at the end of the training where employees had to determine if the behaviors in the cause should be reported to Internal Audit.

Quotables

"I wanted to say thank you for your efforts on putting together the Fraud Awareness training for this year. I have heard nothing but good things from individuals throughout Taxation about the training, which is due to your hard work. Also, I really enjoyed your fresh ideas and how clear you made the entire process. Please keep up the good work!"

- James Roche, Esq

Internal Audit Administrator

Ohio Department of Taxation

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