Adapted from University of Kentucky's Tournament of Champions - Digital Speech & Debate Series - Best Practices
Use of laptop computers, tablet computers, smartphones and other electronic devices able to access the internet is permitted during events. The use of computers during rounds is permitted for both flowing and research purposes including retrieval of evidence stored on drives and accessing resources via the internet.
Students should not attempt to use electronic devices to initiate or respond to contact with outside parties during a round. This rule is intended to restrict the debaters from initiating or responding to any outside contact during a round. Example: A student’s cell phone ringing during a debate would not violate the rule. A student calling, emailing, chatting, text messaging or responding to any contact from their coach during a debate would violate this rule.
The Presiding Officer can call on two methods for other competitors to become recognized to speak. They should announce to the chamber the method they are employing during the session:
By a show of name placards. This involves a competitor making their name placard visible and prominent on their screen.
By raised hand reaction. Most online video chat programs have a button that can be pressed that puts a symbol on the competitor’s screen.
This will be done visually, by show of name placards.
Always arrive for rounds early to "check in" and make sure you can access the platform. Turn on video/audio, including authorizing permissions with your web browser. You can then mute your mic and turn off video until the round begins.
The only person who should have their mic on is the active speaker. Everyone else should mute their mic during a speech.
Debaters should locally record in case of tech failures.
Be aware that during events with cross examination the risk of cross talk and degraded audio is the highest. Competitors will have to adapt from their experience in a live tournament and try to minimize crosstalk.
The active speaker should be occasionally checking to make sure that all participants’ audio is still working/there have not been disconnections.
If a technology issue befalls someone during a round, the person impacted should communicate with the event tab helpline to help resolve the issue.
No one should prepare during any tech downtime.
If someone is the active speaker, they should take more care to ensure that someone does not lose connection mid-speech. Pausing a speech and then resuming after someone re-connects is the simplest way to resolve technology issues.
If you are a non-active speaker, you should only attempt to pause the active speaker if you have suffered a significant degradation of audio that persists for more than mere seconds. 1 second of latency does not warrant pausing a speech. Losing all audio completely warrants alerting your partner to get the speech paused etc.
Unplugging USB devices like microphones or cameras then plugging back in usually fixes most issues.
Exiting and reentering the room fixes some issues.
The best way to connect is to use ethernet and plug it into your router. This is better than WiFi and has drastically improved connectivity. For most computers it requires a USB/USB-C adapter (Amazon e.g.), and an ethernet cable (price depends on length). The second-best way to improve your home internet is to ensure you are debating or speaking in the room where a WiFi router is and there are no objects between you and the router. This also stabilizes video greatly.
If you’ve experienced connectivity issues, you may want to reboot your router before your next video meeting, which flushes its stale connections. Admittedly, rebooting may not be the resolution, but it’s still a good way to prevent problems (especially if the router is on 24/7 for months or years).
To maximize signal quality, you must do one of two things: move the router or move yourself. The closer you are to your router, the better your signal quality. Just like any other radio device, WiFi routers have a particular range. As you move further from it, you’ll get choppy packet delivery (your video and audio could freeze).
An aspect of WiFi connections that even the most well-versed people miss is obstruction. Since your packets basically float in mid-air to the router, avoid putting concrete structures, fingers, and other solid objects between your wireless antenna and the router. If you’re communicating from a mobile device, hold it near the bottom, as most mobile wireless antennas are situated near the top of the device. If your phone’s camera is off to one side, chances are that the antenna is on the opposite side. Keep this in mind when holding your phone in a landscape (horizontal) position.
Also, washing machines, microwaves, furnaces, and other electric appliances can interfere with your WiFi transmissions. Everything that uses electricity (even a light bulb) emits small amounts of radiation that could interfere with radio-based communication. We’re not telling you to stay in the dark and light some candles but at least keep high-energy appliances from sitting between you and the router.
Think of your router as a railroad depot. Every connected device is a train that came to park there. Once all the shunts are occupied, the depot shines a red light signaling other trains that it’s full. Your router doesn’t have a red light, but it still gets overwhelmed.
If you connect more devices to it, you put pressure on its hardware and it eventually uses a “first-come, first-serve” packet management model to compensate. This is disastrous for people trying to converse through video. Typical home routers are meant to handle at most 9 or 10 connected wireless devices. They can theoretically handle up to 255, but we must stress the word “theoretically.” For the optimal video experience, a router needs minimal load in terms of both bandwidth and simultaneous connections.
By the way, running a service that hosts connections to multiple people also counts towards overwhelming the router. Anything you do on wired Ethernet will also have an impact on WiFi.
Routers don’t just magically come with perfect firmware straight out of the assembly line. Chances are your manufacturer is going to notice some bugs that impede your ability to communicate effectively. WiFisuffers the most from this because its standards are always being revised and a vast number of features exist that are not present in Ethernet. Look through your device manufacturer’s website and ensure that you have the latest firmware for your router.
If you bought a router that advertises itself as being optimized for video and VoIP, you’ll likely find an option somewhere within its configuration interface that allows you to enable Wireless Multimedia Extensions (WME) or WiFi Multimedia (WMM). These are two terms used to describe an interoperability feature within some routers that puts a higher priority on media transmissions than on other data. It means that your router will put aside transmission of other packet data in favor of your video and audio transmissions. For more information, refer to your router’s manual.
WiFi networks are like big house parties. When the scene is getting too crowded, it’s time to take a breather at the balcony. In a large network with multiple WiFi access points, your packets might be neglected when sent on a radio channel that’s too occupied. To mitigate this, configure the router to use another channel on the network.
Don’t know if your channel’s busy or not? Unsure of what channel you should use? Wireless network diagnostic tools like MetaGeek’s inSSIDer can help you find this information.
Dual-band routers operate at two different frequencies: 2.4 GHz band (the more common of the two, which is prone to interference from other devices) and the 5 GHz band. The higher frequency really doesn’t offer many advantages, but it does decrease the likelihood that you’ll experience nasty interference and offers a dedicated SSID (wireless connection) that you can use strictly for VoIP and Zoom meetings. Buying a dual-band router gives you that flexibility. Call the 2.4 GHz network “Web” and the other one “Multimedia.” When joining or hosting a conference, connect to the “Multimedia” band and you’re set!
The first thing to note about technology and online debate and speech is you need to practice with your existing laptop to establish a baseline. In early testing what comes in a laptop (in terms of webcam, audio and microphone) is sufficient for debates and speech rounds. The main factor impacting video and audio is your internet connection, not your hardware.