The teaching will consist in the sending of documents, data, exercises, and in interactive help. The student is expected to return his own solutions to the exercises, and he will receive the corrections back.

The course may start at any time, for each individual student, as soon as the fees are received (in fact, as soon as the student is sure to register).

The program is described in full details in a downloadable paper to be published in the EPDIC-7 proceedings, Barcelona, Spain, May 2000. The program summary is below :

Step 1 : Powder pattern recording conditions, phase recognition, use of specific databases.

Step 2 : Indexing powder patterns, part 1 : Treor, Ito, Dicvol.

Step 3 : Indexing powder patterns, part 2 : Crysfire.

Step 4 : Advanced methods for extracting structure factors, part 1.

Step 5 : Advanced methods for extracting structure factors, part 2.

Step 6 : Structure solution by Patterson/direct/molecule location methods, part 1.

Step 7 : Structure solution by Patterson/direct/molecule location methods, part 2.

Step 8 : Structure solution by Patterson/direct/molecule location methods, part 3.

Step 9 : Structure completion and refinement by the Rietveld method, part 1.

Step 10 : Structure completion and refinement by the Rietveld method, part 2.

Last step : Furniture of the final examination problem : a powder pattern of a compound with unknown structure, to be solved by the student in two weeks.