Or, How to Reach Tens of Thousands of People and Earn Half a Million Dollars from Your Goofy Dissertation Project While Also Giving It Away for Free
My online tutorial, An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory (RFT), was first published 20 years ago. It was announced via a post to the RFT listserv on August 17, 2004 and then via a post to the Teaching Behavior Analyst Listserv on August 20, 2004. While it was first hosted on a custom website for RFT, it later became the flagship product of FoxyLearning and CEUniverse.
While I am thrilled that the tutorial is still in use, its longevity is rather remarkable to me for several reasons:
- I developed the tutorial primarily as a vehicle for conducting my dissertation research
- I had no idea RFT would still be a thing 20 years later (spoiler alert: it is!)
- It is rather difficult to keep interactive, multimedia content like this online
Notable Numbers
Before I delve into the history of the tutorial and my analysis of why it has persisted so long, I thought it would be fun to consider some foxy numbers related to the tutorial.
It Has Been Used to Supplement Over 900 Courses in Over 100 Colleges and Universities In More Than 15 Countries Around the World
From the very beginning, the tutorial was designed to be used as a supplement for a larger course (such as a university course or a training program at a clinic). The first courses to use the tutorial supported my dissertation research, and I later built an entire company (FoxyLearning) to support our ability to continue offering this service with a low-cost version of the tutorial. It continues to be used regularly as a supplement to undergraduate courses, graduate courses, and other training programs.
Over 4,000 Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs) Have Completed It for Continuing Education
Shortly after launching FoxyLearning in 2010, my buddy DJ Moran said, “Hey! You should offer this for CEUs for BCBAs.” And I said, “Sounds cool! What does that mean?” After schooling me on the wonders of board certification and continuing education requirements, DJ went on to serve as FoxyLearning’s first CEU Coordinator for the next 8 years. Thanks for the great idea, DJ!
Over 25,000 Undergraduate and Graduate Students Have Completed It As a Course Assignment
This number is the one that is perhaps the most astonishing to me. When I developed this tutorial early in the millennium, I’m not sure there were even 25,000 people in the world who had even heard of RFT!
It Has Generated Over $500,000 In Revenue Since 2010
The tutorial was only offered for free from 2004 to 2010. It is still offered for free, but I began selling access to “premium” versions (that includes things like completion tracking and a certificate of completion) in 2010 because I needed revenue to support the ongoing development, support, and maintenance of the tutorial. That is the secret origin of FoxyLearning!
The revenue from the tutorial is pretty evenly divided between students purchasing a low-cost version as a course supplement (about 56%) and BCBAs and other professionals purchasing a more expensive version of it for CEUs (about 44%). While I’m amazed that I turned my goofy dissertation project into something that has made half a million dollars, please note that it has not made me rich (seriously, I’m still paying off my student loans)! When that 500k is spread across 15 years, it only comes out to about $33,333 in revenue (not profit) per year. Without that revenue stream to support it, I can confidently say that the tutorial would no longer exist.
Countless Visitors Have Completed It for Free!
They are literally countless because we don’t fully track visitors completing the free, open-access version of the tutorial. To preserve our resources, their completion of the tutorial is not recorded or stored in our database. We could probably piece together an estimate by analyzing all of our website traffic logs and analytics for the past 20 years, but that seems like an awful lot of work. I can tell you, though, that in 2024 over 6,000 people visited the home page of the free version of the tutorial!
History
The tutorial was initially developed for my dissertation research at Arizona State University. I was enrolled in a Learning and Instructional Technology doctoral program and wanted to investigate methods of teaching abstract concepts. My background was in behavior analysis, having graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) with my bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in behavior analysis. I also spent a year in the behavior analysis doctoral program at West Virginia University and worked at Morningside Academy for a year. While in graduate school at UNR, I worked for Steve Hayes at Context Press and participated in his research lab, which is where I became more familiar with RFT and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).
After contributing to a chapter in the first book-length treatment of RFT, I decided RFT would be a good topic for my dissertation project (partly because it involves lots of abstract concepts!). I was also interested in helping disseminate the theory, as many folks (myself included) found RFT confusing when first reading about it. I suspected some of that was due to the fact that it was dealing with abstract, process-related concepts that are difficult to capture with text alone. I thought an interactive, multimedia tutorial that implemented best practices for concept instruction might help. And so my long journey began!
The first version of the tutorial was developed over the course of about a year and a half from January 2003 to August 2004, after which it was launched on RelationalFrameTheory.com, a website I built to host the tutorial and other content related to RFT. It was developed in Adobe Flash, with custom PHP code used to record learner data to a MySQL database. Flash doesn’t run on many devices any more, so here is a slideshow consisting of a few screenshots from the first version of the tutorial:
I used the tutorial as the foundation of my dissertation research, with instructors using it as a course assignment and their students serving as my participants (200 students enrolled in 17 different courses from 5 different countries, to be exact). In 2005 the tutorial received the Nova Southeastern Award for Outstanding Practice by a Graduate Student in Instructional Design from the Design & Development division of the Association for Educational Communications & Technology. With an award name that long, you know it’s got to be good.
After completing my doctorate, I continued to make the tutorial available for free as a public service. To my surprise, it grew increasingly popular over time, with hundreds to thousands of people continuing to complete it every year. As time went on, the costs and effort required to maintain it grew. Web technology evolves quickly, meaning even a static web app requires regular updates to its code and server software to stay secure and functional. Providing technical support for users added to the burden, and I realized that monetizing the tutorial was the only way to sustain it. This realization led to the creation of FoxyLearning.
FoxyLearning in 2010
When FoxyLearning was launched in 2010, an updated version of the RFT tutorial (now with audio narration! Fancy!) was its sole offering. Now treated as a commercial product, the tutorial was no longer free to access. It was still published in Flash and integrated into a Drupal website using some custom code. FoxyLearning soon became an approved continuing education provider by the BACB and the tutorial was first offered for BCBA CEUs in March 2010. In June 2012, a new version of the tutorial was released in an HTML5 format because Steve Jobs and Apple sounded the death knell for Flash as a platform for modern devices.
In 2014, while employed at The Ohio State University, I attended an inspiring talk by OSU alumnus Cable Green, the Director of Open Education for Creative Commons. He suggested that educational companies and organizations could adopt a “freemium” model for educational content, whereby the content is provided for free (and, ideally, published under a Creative Commons license), while revenue is generated by services related to the content. It blew my mind. It aligned perfectly with my values and desire to disseminate behavioral science as widely and effectively as possible. Within weeks of hearing Cable’s talk, I completely changed FoxyLearning’s business model. In April 2014, the RFT tutorial (along with all of our other content) was once again free for anyone to access, with only services such as completion tracking or certificates of completion requiring a fee. This was a big risk for our company (would anyone still pay for content they can access for free?), but 10 years later, I can say with confidence that the gamble paid off. The tutorial has been updated many times in the years since, based on both changes in technology and feedback from users.
Why Has It Lasted So Long?
When my tutorial was first launched in 2004, it was rather unique because there weren’t really a lot of resources for learning about RFT. There was the original purple book, some research articles, and the odd lecture or presentation by an RFT researcher. These days, however, there are many resources available for learning about RFT. There are online courses, multiple books, in-person workshops, webinars, blog posts, podcasts, countless conference presentations, etc. But, even in the face of this stiff competition, my tutorial is still going strong. Why? I think there are six key reasons.
1) Instructional Design Matters
Perhaps the most important reason behind the tutorial’s longevity is the fact that I spent a lot of time (over a year, in fact) and effort on the initial instructional design. I adopted a systems approach to the instruction, generally following the classic ADDIE (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation) model. Many hours were spent on the instructional objectives, scope and sequence, content analysis, concept analyses, drafting practice activities, conducting formative and summative evaluations, beta testing, and making iterative improvements. I implemented evidence-based instructional strategies and best practices for multimedia instruction whenever possible. A lot of time was spent generating graphics and animations that supported the instruction.
Many newer resources focused on RFT and behavior analysis in general might look quite slick, but they are often little more than talking heads telling you information (maybe with a quiz at the end, if you’re lucky). They are lectures. While lectures and TED talks and podcasts and short films and the like can certainly be inspirational and helpful for raising awareness, they are often more informational than instructional. Behavioral psychologists have known for a long time that lecturing is not the same as educating.
If telling were teaching, we’d all be so smart we could hardly stand it.
– Robert F. Mager (1968)
The RFT tutorial has always been focused on providing not only information, but also specific and meaningful practice, feedback, and interactions designed to support the learning objectives. It implements mastery learning and active student responding in a sort of blend of programmed instruction (as developed by B.F. Skinner, Susan Meyer Markle, and others) and the personalized system of instruction or PSI (as developed by Fred Keller and others). It is deliberately instructional and not just informational or entertaining.
When you’re running an elearning company, good instructional design is good for business. When learners actually learn what you intend for them to learn, they tend to be happy customers. If they are students, they let their instructors know that they liked the tutorial and the instructor is likely to assign it again. If they are BCBAs, they are likely to purchase other CEUs from us or tell their friends and colleagues about the tutorial.
The ratings for the tutorial indicate our customers are generally pretty happy with it. Bear in mind that the students are usually being required by their school or instructor to purchase the tutorial and the tutorial typically takes them 5+ hours to complete. The BCBAs are being required to exert considerably more effort than is required of most other CEU events. And yet the vast majority of the reviewers still give the tutorial a rating of 4 or 5 stars. Pretty cool.
Reviews from Students
Reviews from BCBAs
2) Open Access Matters
In 2014, we decided to once again provide free access to the tutorial and to publish it under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. That means other people can share or adapt the tutorial for non-commercial purposes. While it might seem crazy for a company to give free access to its flagship product, this decision was important for several reasons:
- It was a direct reflection of our values focused on disseminating behavioral science and promoting open educational resources, open science, and the open web.
- It made the tutorial and our other content accessible to the entire internet-connected world for free.
- It allowed paying customers to “try it before you buy it.”
- It allowed Google and other search engines to begin indexing our tutorial content, allowing it to show up in search results for relevant terms (e.g., Google “rft generalized operant” and you’ll probably see one or more pages from the tutorial in the results).
- It allows the tutorial to potentially outlive either me or FoxyLearning. Even if FoxyLearning were to end without a succession plan in place, someone else could still legally publish (and/or) adapt the tutorial. Contrast this with the amazing Headsprout reading programs, for example, which were released under a traditional copyright license and eventually sold to another publisher (Learning A-Z). That publisher recently decided to discontinue them and, sadly, there does not appear to be much that can be done to revive them now.
3) Affordability Matters
The paid version of the tutorial is currently offered at two price points: $14 for students completing it for a course and $70 for BCBAs who want to earn 7 CEUs. In addition, we have adopted country-based pricing to make the tutorial more affordable throughout the world.
These prices are very competitive for a tutorial of this length. Some providers of online courses and other elearning content seem focused on maximizing profit, while we are focused on maximizing access (while earning enough to sustain our business). Keeping the tutorial affordable has undoubtedly played an important role in its continued adoption and longevity.
4) Customer Service Matters
Ever since the launch of FoxyLearning, I have focused on providing exemplary customer support. There is an omnipresent help button on our website, providing quick access to extensive help documentation (including FAQs and troubleshooting tips) and a contact form. We typically respond to messages sent to our helpdesk within a matter of minutes or hours, not days. Sometimes we even have live chat or an annoying AI chatbot available!
All of this sets us apart from many of our competitors, who have often have scant or no support documentation, make it difficult to figure out how to contact them for support, and/or do not respond to messages very quickly. People completing an online tutorial or course often feel disconnected from the person or business providing it and can experience maddening frustration if they face a technical problem with no clear path to resolving it. We work hard to avoid that.
5) RFT Still Matters
RFT remains an important topic for many people, due to at least three major factors:
- The explosive growth of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
- The explosive growth of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), particularly in supporting autistic individuals (or individuals with autism)
- The ongoing research on derived stimulus relations, relational framing, and novel applications of RFT
If RFT was not still a thing, the tutorial would obviously not be of much use to people. I’m pleased that so many people continue to seek it out and find it valuable.
6) Revenue Matters
Simply creating great elearning content is not enough to ensure it will endure. Some sort of infrastructure must exist to support it, and that infrastructure requires funding. Without the revenue generated by FoxyLearning, the RFT tutorial likely would have been discontinued many years ago.
The Future
I built FoxyLearning specifically to support the RFT tutorial and plan on supporting it for as long as people find it useful. We also use our platform to support other tutorials and content now. Have you built some great elearning content related to behavioral science? Tell us about it. Maybe we can publish your content on FoxyLearning to help it thrive, earn you some money, gain a wide reach, and help others for 20+ years, too!
