Our mission is to expand knowledge and understanding of behavioral science by making awesome online learning that is:
Effective
We want to provide online learning that is effective. That’s why we develop our content using evidence-based principles of instructional design and best practices for multimedia instruction. Each of our tutorials has also been the focus of a study demonstrating its efficacy, and we regularly update our content and design based on learner performance and feedback.
Open
We believe open access to research and quality educational content is vital to the dissemination of behavioral science. That’s why we provide free access to our tutorials and videos on the open web, release most of our content under a Creative Commons license, and proudly sponsor the Open Behavioral Science website.
Affordable
Students and professionals are often at the mercy of large textbook publishers or CEU providers who are seeking to maximize their profits with high prices. We are a small, efficient, family-owned company that strives to keep costs low so that we can offer quality content and services at a truly affordable price.
Simple
Interacting with a poorly designed website or app can be extremely frustrating. We work hard to make sure our site is as simple and easy to use as possible. We also work hard to provide you with quick and friendly customer service when it’s not as easy to use as we thought!
Fun
Although we think our content is important, we don’t think it always needs to be self-important. We strive for a lighthearted tone with our tutorials, including humorous graphics and examples whenever possible. In other words, we make learning fun! Except when it’s boring.
Our Team
Our Tutorial Authors
Our Story
In 2002, Eric Fox was a doctoral student studying learning and instructional technology at Arizona State University and beginning to work on his dissertation. His background was in behavior analysis, having earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and a master’s degree in behavior analysis from the University of Nevada, Reno. He had also spent a year in the doctoral program in behavior analysis at West Virginia University and another year working at Morningside Academy in Seattle. While he was in Reno, he developed a strong interest in relational frame theory (RFT) after participating in Steve Hayes’s research lab and co-authoring a key chapter in the first book-length treatment of RFT.
For his dissertation, he decided to investigate an RFT-informed approach to teaching complex verbal concepts via a self-paced, online tutorial. He needed content for his tutorial that involved complex verbal concepts, so he selected RFT itself as the topic (partly because people seemed to have trouble understanding it and partly because he wanted to help disseminate it). Eric began developing an online tutorial called An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory using Flash, PHP, and MySQL, and released the first version to the public in 2004. He made it available for free and encouraged instructors to adopt it as a supplement for their courses so that he could gain participants for his dissertation study. By 2005 he had completed his dissertation and began a faculty position in the Psychology Department at Western Michigan University, but kept his RFT tutorial online as a free public service to anyone who still wanted to use it.
The tutorial remained online for several years after that and, to Eric’s great surprise, continued to be used by many people (more than 10,000, in fact). Eventually, the time and money required to provide technical support to users and to maintain the tutorial (web technology changes rapidly, so even a web app with no content changes demands regular updates of code and server software to remain functional and secure) became so great that Eric realized he would somehow need to monetize the tutorial to keep it alive. Thus, Foxylearning was born (actually, “FoxyLearning” was born…but we stopped capitalizing the “L” after a few years because we decided we were too cool for CamelCase).
The idea for Foxylearning originated while Eric was still at Western Michigan University, but the website and company (with the RFT tutorial as the only product) was not officially launched until 2010, after he had moved to San Francisco to pursue other opportunities. Many of those opportunities were not particularly gratifying, however, and he continued to operate and grow Foxylearning as a side business. He was encouraged because he saw a real need in behavioral science for well-designed, high-quality elearning that was affordable to the average student or professional. Over time, Foxylearning became a CEU provider for Board Certified Behavior Analysts, collaborated with other authors to create new tutorials, started offering research articles and flashcards, and even began developing elearning for the Behavior Analyst Certification Board itself. Eventually, in early 2015, Foxylearning had grown to the point where Eric was able to quit his “day job” and focus on Foxylearning full-time.
