I propose the business model of being a live helpdesk-lab for non-technologically fluent people. Essentially the apple genius bar/desk thing for non-apple prod

I propose the business model of being a live helpdesk-lab for non-technologically fluent people. Essentially the apple genius bar/desk thing for non-apple products. Where I live the parks n rec dept competes with the local community college for what boils down to "intro to XYZ for seniors" classes where XYZ is everything from basic operation to office applications to photoshop to CAD. Similar to the linked article topic although obviously on a much larger scale. My wife convinced my MiL to attend and she enjoyed it with three problems: 1) They had seniors running the lab on the theory that seniors are less intimidated and some aspect of monkey see monkey do. It is true that a 66 year old retired CAD draftsman is probably pretty well qualified but they also had 70-80 year old instructors and you know how MS has to completely change the UI for office every two years or so, so it decays into blind leading the blind. Of course a kid isn't going to be any better or faster at using the new UI they'll just have a better attitude. But yeah... there's a demand for course beyond "wheres the power button" and its VERY hard to find knowledgeable instructors for those higher level courses. 2) They actually made the local paper by banning students from taking classes more than 3 times, some people took the same course 20 times, being a laboratory format people were encouraged to bring in real life examples from home and its cheap because retirees are "poor" and getting help at the lab is more pleasant than using telephone support, so retired people were signing up twenty times for the same photoshop class to methodically redo entire scrapbooks full of photos. See also the genealogy class and some others. 3) The third and final problem they had was assuming it was almost a weed-out engineering class like multivariate calculus at uni where 200 of my closest friends sat in a lecture hall. Well not quite that bad. But they miss the point that its fundamentally a special ed program. 99% of the population "just does it" so via natural self selection they have students who really need help, like some are functionally illiterate or innumerate as a fundamental problem, for example. You can staff a multivariate calculus discussion group at an engineering school with 25 high math achievers and one non-English speaking TA and it'll work, but a special ed senior computing skills class requires near 1:1 ratio for some of the students, leading to the problem above of some stubborn students take the class 3, 4, 5 times before they figure everything out. You need teachers who know special ed and old people primarily with all this IT or CS stuff secondarily or even irrelevant. You don't need someone who can do red/black trees, you need someone who can handle "impatient and anger mgmt issues" or is smart enough to do it themselves other than being illiterate or is just plain ole mental illness level depressed and needs to talk or whatever. Special ed students mixed in with regular ole students of course, because they aren't pre-testing or tracking students based on ability. At any rate, whats portrayed as a disaster for a community college with its predetermined teaching model and assigned from above curricula could be someone else's business model of "physical helpdesk as a service". Maybe for more skilled users a virtual helpdesk as a service, I donno.