Congratulations on your choice. You are looking to help people and further your own interests and abilities. How cool is that?

My first suggestion is for you to clearly define your course or workshop syllabus. What "exactly" are you going to cover. This gives potential students answers to most of their questions about whether or not the course will be the right one for them and makes their choices easier. It also makes it easier for you to clearly define how the course will work, what materials and examples you'll need, and how best to approach teaching the material.

A bad example might be:

Learn about computer hardware maintenance. Everything you need to get practical work done around the home or small business.

You'll learn: copying and archiving disk to disk, disk to external devices, disk to web. You'll know how to set up printers and external disk drives, cdrom and dvdrom devices and all external cabling.

A better example:

Learn the necessities of computer hardware maintenance. Make your life easier by understanding the basic components of a computer system set in terms that everyone can understand.

At the end of this course you will:

*know what all of the basic cable connections are and how to use them.
*attach and setup a printer to your system.
*know how to efficiently back up or copy large amounts of data.

The second one gives you clear examples, well defined goals, and is worded in a way that is non-threatening to non-technical users. Remember, the people you are wanting to teach have not figured out how to do this for themselves so they don't want to be intimidated in a propeller head course with lots of technical jargon they aren't going to understand. Make simple and non-threatening and deal with what they will take away.

Your question regarding how long it should be will be determined by practice. You can do it in front of a video camera in your living room or you can try the course with a couple of family members or friends. Remember that anything you do with hands on takes 4 or 5 times longer when you work with real students than it takes when you work with practice folks or by yourself. Practicing live will also help you tune your notes, examples, analogies and makes sure that your demonstrations work.

In the event that the college decides that they don't want to let you use their facilities there are a several things for you to consider.

One is setting up your own facility. If you go to ebay and look for "Dell 260" (there are others so this isn't necessarily a dell recommendation) you can find lots of 10 of these systems for around $3500.00. Add another $1500 for 10 flat panel monitors, $200 for cables and miscellaneous "stuff", and another $200 for a hub, $750 for a projector and a screen and you have an instant system set up. If you need software find a student to buy it at his or her student discount or if you have access to a library discount do that. The bottom line is that you can create a mobile classroom and all you need to do what it is you want to do for well under $10,000.

If you choose not to go for 10 computers then cut it down to 4 or 5. These machines are relatively small and portable. With wireless cards you can cut the transportation and setup down as well.

If you choose to go with laptops they run under $500 for one that would be more than adequate for your purposes and also be very portable.

There are a couple of other hardware options to consider. Depending on your ability to negotiate a good deal you can probably talk a local computer repair or retail sales business into donating hardware for your classes, or giving you an outstanding deal where you will advertise them on an exclusive basis on your website, printed materials, and in your classes in exchange for payment terms on the hardware and software you need. They might also be amenable to putting clients in your classes so the relationship becomes an good symbiosis.

Other options include online tutoring. Any web host that uses Fantastico add on software gives you access to Moodle. Its a great online education system and its free with fantastico hosting accounts. Just a couple off the top of my head are www.bluehost.com and www.hostrocket.com. Not only does online hosting and tutoring help folks get answers to their questions its also a great marketing medium for showing your knowledge and promoting your instructor led courses.

Other alternatives are to inquire at companies in your area. Many small to medium companies have training rooms with 8 to 10 systems that they will let out for a nominal fee. I've rented them for less than $100 for an evening. Some will even exchange facility usage for you teaching their staff.

Renting a small facility from hotels, community centers, restaurants, or coffee shops are some other venues that should provide you with the facility that you need and appear professional and comfortable. There is a coffee shop in my city that rents a room with wifi for $15 per hour, it seats 10 and they let your hourly rate apply to anything they serve in the shop. So you take care of refreshments and food at the same time as your facility.

Your status as a Veteran also gives you access to vocational reeducation money and business funding in the form of grants and low interest loans.

Lots of other alternatives as well. The difference between success doing something you'd like to do and losing this opportunity is being creative.