Why I'm making IT courses for people who hate IT

I fix computers for a living, and I have been doing some version of it for about 15 years. The thing I keep noticing is that most problems are the same handful of problems. Wi-Fi that says it's connected but nothing loads. A printer that "disappeared". A password reset that goes in circles. A phone that's full again.

None of these are hard. They are just confusing if nobody ever showed you what to check, and in what order.

What LearnIT is

LearnIT is short courses for those problems. Each one takes about 20 minutes:

1. A short video, a few minutes long.
2. A quiz with real situations, where every answer comes with a plain explanation.
3. A one-page checklist you keep for the next time it happens.

The first one is Wi-Fi Says Connected But Nothing Works. It's $5, and it opens soon. You buy it here, and you get signed up on learn.jaybb.com where the course lives.

If it doesn't help, you get your money back within 30 days. If you haven't really started it, ask any time and I'll refund you.

Why not just YouTube

You can find most of this on YouTube, and if that works for you, I think you should. The trouble is most videos are made by people who already know the words, for people who already know the words. You end up three videos deep, in a settings menu you've never seen, and now something else is broken.

I would rather explain it once, in the right order, and stop when you're done. No "smash that like button", no 40-minute deep dive into how routers work. Just enough to fix it and understand why it worked.

Why the order matters

Here's a small example from the Wi-Fi course. When the internet goes out, most people restart the computer first. That's probably the last thing I would restart. The order I'd go in is the modem, then the router, then the device, and the reason is that each one depends on the one before it. Restart them in the wrong order and you can be back where you started 10 minutes later, convinced it's "still broken".

That's the kind of thing I want every course to leave you with. Not a trick, a way to think about it so you can handle the next one yourself.

Who's teaching

Me. I manage IT for a homebuilder, and before that I spent 10 years as a systems administrator at an IT consulting firm. Over the years I've worked with 2 homebuilders and 5 construction companies, and I help people and small businesses with their tech on the side. My degree is in information systems security, and I have been using computers for about 25 years, building them for 20 and supporting them for 15. Most of what goes into these courses is stuff I explained to someone this month.

What's next

I'm also putting together a few free classes on the things I think everyone should know: spotting scams, passwords that don't drive you crazy, and backing up your photos before you need to. If you want an invite when those open, there's a field for that on the LearnIT page.

And if there's a computer problem you keep running into, send me a message. There's a good chance I'll turn it into a course.