Running Asynchronous (Recorded) Events

If you are considering holding speech events asynchronously at your tournament, consider whether Tabroom.com’s asynchronous features can help automate the judging process! Tabroom.com can support events where students have submitted links to a recording of their performance and judges have a period of time to watch and judge those recordings. If you set up your events this way, a judge can log in to Tabroom.com, see their assignments, and click video icons next to each student’s code to watch their videos in order and complete their ballots. This process was used for the online 2020 Middle School Speech Challenge and preliminary rounds of the 2020 National Tournament supplemental speech events.

Asynchronous speech rounds using one recording for the duration of the tournament is a FREE feature offered through Tabroom.com. Tournament directors do not need to purchase NSDA Campus rooms, as Campus is only for live competition.

Tabroom.com’s free asynchronous features do NOT support live viewing of recorded rounds with all round participants, nor does it support multiple recordings for one entry being used throughout the course of a tournament. Both of these things could be accomplished with more manual work on part of the tournament director, but as far as automated features go, Tabroom.com is only set up to allow judges to view static videos for each entry on their own time within a set period.

Tournament Settings

Before registration opens for your tournament: In Tabroom.com, go to Settings > Events and select your event. On the Online tab, toggle “Online event” and select the setting “Asynchronous links to online videos”. Do this for each event that will be held asynchronously. This setting will create a space for coaches to copy/paste a link to a video in the entry details of any student entered in an asynchronous event during the registration process. Use this option if you would like competitors to record their video on an external platform and submit the link to you via Tabroom.com. This is what coaches will see on their entry:

If you are comfortable with coaches adding links to student videos directly into Tabroom.com, you do not need to follow the "Uploading Videos from Outside Tabroom.com" instructions below.

Uploading Videos from Outside Tabroom.com

Skip this step if you are collecting links from coaches within the Tabroom.com registration process using the step above. If you have students submit videos to you outside of Tabroom.com (using Speeches.Cloud recording site, submitting videos via Google form, etc.), additional steps will need to be taken to get these video links into Tabroom.com. You will still need to complete step 1 first. Then, create a CSV (must be in .csv format!) of the entries’ video links in each event. For example, you should have a Humorous Interpretation CSV with one column representing the student’s full name as entered in Tabroom.com and a second column representing a link to the student’s video.

• In Tabroom.com, go Entries > Data and click “Import CSV/Excel. Under “Import Video Links”, select your file, the event, and click Upload.

• Next, go to Entries > Events and select the event you uploaded videos for. Clicking on an entry’s name and selecting “Piece/Quals” will show you a link to the video that was uploaded.

• Tabroom.com will automatically drop any entries that it does not find a matching name for in your CSV. This is helpful to automate the drop process for students who do not submit videos, but we recommend going through the students who were auto-dropped (Entries > Events > select event > Drops) and confirming that they did not submit videos.

Tip: If a student’s name has characters like hyphens or apostrophes, the system may struggle to match it to the upload. Make sure you double check that entries were not erroneously dropped due to these characters. Additionally, it is important that students upload their videos under the exact name they are listed under in Tabroom.com in order for the matching process to work. A student submitting a recording under a nickname or shortened name would not match in Tabroom.com. Always check the drops!

Set Up Your Schedule

Only do this step after you have completed tournament set up from the first section. In your tournament, go Settings > Schedule. The time blocks you assign to each round will control how long ballots are visible for judges. For example, if you set Dramatic Interpretation round 1 to run from 8:00 a.m. on Monday to 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, ballots will automatically close at 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday. This is also the deadline that will show up on judges' ballots.

Note that you will have to publish your rounds (On the Schemats page, publish full schematic under Share & Enjoy. Or, go Paneling > Web Publish to publish all of your schematics at once.) before the ballots show up at all; they will not automatically publish at the time block start time. They will automatically shut down at the time block end time.

Next, check your general tournament settings by going Settings > Tournament > Dates. Check your tournament start and end time. Make sure your time slots on your schedule do not happen outside of your general tournament start time/date and end time/date. For example, if you wanted ballots to open on Monday but had your general tournament start time to be Tuesday, ballots would not publish. Additionally, check the “Script Info and Uploads by” deadline on this page. When this deadline has passed, coaches will no longer be able to submit a link to their video through Tabroom.com’s registration process.

Day of Your Tournament

Make sure you publish your schematics to make ballots show up! On the Schemats page, publish full schematic under Share & Enjoy. Or, go Paneling > Web Publish to publish all of your schematics at once. Ballots will automatically disappear from judges at the time block end time you set up in your schedule.

This is how round assignments will appear on a judge’s Tabroom.com account after you publish the round.

This is what judges will see after they click “Start Round” next to a ballot. They will click video icons to watch the recordings.