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!
Sustainable
We are committed to doing our part to counteract climate change and minimize our carbon footprint. Our website is hosted using carbon-neutral servers and we contribute 1% of our revenue to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere. In addition, our team works from home, reducing pollution from a daily commute to the office.
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.
Meet Our Team
Eric J. Fox, Ph.D.
Founder & Director
Eric founded FoxyLearning in 2010 and totally named it after himself. He’s been doing instructional design, behavior analysis, and web development for over 20 years, if you can believe that. He is also the author of An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory.
Dr. Eric J. Fox is the Founder and Director of FoxyLearning. He holds a doctorate in Learning and Instructional Technology from Arizona State University and a master’s degree in behavior analysis from the University of Nevada, Reno. During the wild 1990s, he also spent a year in the doctoral program in behavior analysis at West Virginia University and worked as an instructional designer at Morningside Academy in Seattle. He has been doing instructional design, behavior analysis, and web development for more than 20 years, and previously served as a faculty member in the psychology department of Western Michigan University, Dean of Instruction at Saybrook University, Director of Instructional Design for Altius Education, Senior Content Developer at Cengage Learning, and Director of Educational Technology for The Ohio State University College of Medicine. His love of learning, technology, and behavioral science is coupled with an unhealthy affinity for Batman.
Nicole Bank, Ph.D., BCBA, LBA-TX
CEU Coordinator & Content Jedi
Nicole joined FoxyLearning in 2018 and considers it one of the best decisions of her life (note that this is mere speculation, as she has never publicly stated anything remotely like this). She also runs Current Contents in ABA and maintains the corresponding ABA-specific research database.
Nicole Bank is a BCBA with a Ph.D. in Information Science. She studied Psychology and Speech, Language and Hearing at the University of Colorado and then Behavior Analysis at the University of North Texas. Nicole spent her 20-year professional career sharing the benefits of behavior analytic technology to families and caregivers of children with developmental disabilities in Colorado, North Texas and Brazil. She supports the field of behavior analysis as a member of ABAI and TxABA and a founding member of Four Corners ABA. She recently finished a doctoral degree in information science with two goals: to assist professional behavior analysts in accessing and using research to inform evidence-based practice and to share the benefits of single-subject research with the information science community. She currently runs Current Contents in ABA and maintains the corresponding ABA-specific research database.
Meet Our Tutorial authors
Linda A. LeBlanc, Ph.D., BCBA-D
Coauthor of Teaching Listener Responding to Children with Autism
Dr. Linda A. LeBlanc is the President of LeBlanc Behavioral Consulting. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and a Board Certified Behavior Analyst. She received her Ph.D. in 1996 from Louisiana State University and previously served on the psychology faculties at Claremont McKenna College (1997-1999), Western Michigan University (1999-2008), and Auburn University (2009-2012).
Norman Peterson, Ph.D.
Author of An Introduction to Verbal Behavior
Dr. Norm Peterson recently retired as the Director of Operations at the Foundation for Behavioral Resources. He earned his Ph.D. in Psychology from Western Michigan University, where he was one of the first graduates of that department’s doctoral program in Behavior Analysis. Prior to his work at the Foundation, Dr. Peterson also served as a faculty member at Western Michigan University and as a senior HR Consultant at Consumers Energy.
Jamie Severtson, Ph.D., BCBA-D
Coauthor of Teaching Listener Responding to Children with Autism
Dr. Jamie Severtson is the Clinical Director at Autism Learning Partners in Broomfield, Colorado. She is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst and a Licensed Behavior Analyst in the state of Missouri. Previously, she served as Assistant Professor and Graduate Coordinator of the Master of Arts in Applied Behavior Analysis Program at Southeast Missouri State University. Dr. Severtson holds a Ph.D. in Behavior Analysis from Western Michigan University.
Melissa C. Mackal, Ph.D., BCBA
Coauthor of ABA Terminology for Effective Practice
Dr. Melissa Mackal is the Managing Director and Owner of Global Behavioral Health. She holds a master’s degree in clinical psychology and doctorate in Instructional Systems and Learning Technologies as well as being board certified in behavior analysis. She began her behavior analysis journey in the early 1990’s working in New Jersey and in conjunction with local schools catering specifically to children with autism. She continued her career in Florida as a certified behavior analyst in both the private and public sectors. It is there where she completed her doctorate at Florida State University under the tutelage of Dr. Walt Wager and other esteemed faculty within the
ISD program and School of Education. She has over 15 years of instructional design experience,
having designed and developed training and performance solutions in a wide array of domains: behavioral and clinical care, corporate, non-profits, industry, and military.
Timothy Slocum, Ph.D.
Coauthor of Mastering the Basics of Visual Analysis
Dr. Timothy A. Slocum is a Professor and Department Head of the Department of Special Education & Rehabilitation at Utah State University. He earned his doctorate in Special Education at the University of Washington in 1991. Dr. Slocum received the 2011 Fred S. Keller Behavioral Education award from Division 25 of the American Psychological Association and the 2014 Ernie Wing Award for Excellence in Evidence-Based Education from the Wing Institute.
Kaneen Smyer, Ph.D., BCBA-D
Coauthor of Teaching Listener Responding to Children with Autism
Dr. Kaneen Smyer is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst who received her Ph.D. in 2012 from Auburn University. She has worked with individuals with developmental disabilities across the lifespan since 2003 and is the Program Director at Ivymount Corporation.
Robert Wallander, Ph.D., BCBA-D
Coauthor of ABA Terminology for Effective Practice
Robert Wallander received his Bachelor of Science in psychology from at Drake University under Scott Wood, his Masters in ABA from Western Michigan University under Jack Michael and his Ph.D. in psychology at The Florida State University under Jon Bailey. Dr. Wallander has been in continuous applied practice for 30 years following his receipt of a Master’s Degree and Florida Certification in 1993. Now a BCBA-D and Licensed Behavior Analyst, Dr. Wallander is has practiced in residential, school and community settings, teaching behavioral analysis and conducting research on behavior analytic topics range from complex verbal relations, functional assessment procedures, and technical aspects of evidence-based therapies. Dr. Wallander’s interest in the topic of how terminology affects clinical quality and effectiveness when a student of Dr. Jack Michael’s at Western Michigan University. Arguments made for mastering technical language for the purpose of improving ABA’s ability to be socially valid were learned there and continue to the present in which Dr Wallander teaches both precise terminology and illustrates how this is connected to and delivery of socially valid outcomes. Currently, Dr. Wallander has focused his research into the advanced verbal behavior of experts who examine graphed or otherwise summarized data and generate clinical recommendations. Specifically, he has incorporated the “think aloud” methodology and protocol analysis to study these phenomena for the purpose of standardizing and improving clinical decision making for all practitioners. To facilitate the study and reporting of his findings, he founded The Principal Research Group, a collective brings of scientists, authors, and practitioners who examine expertise in clinical thinking.
Katie Wolfe, Ph.D., BCBA-D
Coauthor of Mastering the Basics of Visual Analysis
Dr. Katie Wolfe is an associate professor of Special Education in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of South Carolina, where she teaches coursework in applied behavior analysis and early childhood special education. She received her PhD in Disability Disciplines from Utah State University in 2013 and is a Board Certified Behavior Analyst.
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.
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. To learn more, check out the fun, interactive timeline below!