Guidelines for power outages during teaching

Guidelines for scheduled and unexpected power outages

If the date and time of a power outage are known in advance, the teaching events that would have taken place during that time will be cancelled. All students will be informed of this in a university-wide email (sent to all Aalto.fi addresses). Teachers can use MyCourses to notify students of changes to course schedules.

In the case of unexpected power outages, teaching will be interrupted. You may spend a maximum of 15 minutes in the teaching space waiting for the power to return if the lecture does not depend on audiovisual (AV) equipment. After a power outage, the AV system will take about 25 minutes to be back in operation. Always follow the instructions of the Lobby Services staff. If you are in experimental work facilities, exit for safety reasons. If you cannot provide the students with a space where they can wait for the power outage to end, the students should go home/leave the campus.

If a scheduled power outage is expected in the afternoon, students should attend teaching until that point. If a scheduled power outage will take place in the morning, teaching may continue after noon when the power has returned. If an unexpected power outage occurs in the morning, teaching will be organised remotely starting from noon, or it will be cancelled. If a power outage begins or still continues after 15:00, all teaching after this hour will be cancelled.

In principle, a teaching event cancelled due to a power outage will be replaced by a remote teaching event or a lecture recording if the teacher thinks that this is necessary to ensure that the learning outcomes of the course are attained. When deciding the date and time of the replacement event, take account of the other courses in the students’ model timetable. Academic timetable and programme planning officers can help you find a suitable time slot in the model timetable. Send your students a MyCourses message to inform them of the make-up lecture. In other words, you do not need to enter every online make-up lecture into Asio and Sisu.

If you absolutely need to hold the make-up teaching event in a classroom, the timetable planning officers will help you find a suitable room and book it for you, in which case Asio and Sisu will also be updated.

The replacement event may not extend the course into the following teaching period, unless the course would continue in that period in any case.

Interruptions to examinations and interim tests

If an unexpected power outage occurs during an examination, the examination will be stopped. The examination invigilator will wait for a maximum of 15 minutes for the power to return. The exam papers are collected from the students, and the students need to leave the room. After a discontinued examination, the teacher in charge of the course decides on whether the study attainments may be evaluated fairly or whether a new examination should be arranged.

When an exam/interim test is cancelled, the timetable planning officers will seek to reschedule it as close to the original date and time as possible. An exam may also be postponed to a previously planned make-up exam date if this date is reasonably close to the original date and the postponement does not cause the students unreasonable inconvenience.

Instructions in case electronic EXAM is interrupted due to a power outage