NSDA Campus

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This software is intended for Live/Synchronous Competition. Asynchronous speech rounds using one recording for the duration of the tournament is a FREE feature offered through Tabroom.com.

Determining How Many Rooms to Purchase

For each day of your tournament, determine the maximum number of rounds you will run simultaneously—that number is the number of rooms you should purchase. This is equivalent to an in-person tournament—you will need the same number of NSDA Campus rooms per day you would need to hold those same rounds in person per day.


  • Example: If you will have 30 rounds happening at the same time on Friday, then 25 on Saturday, and 10 on Sunday, you’ll need to purchase 65 rooms.
  • Flighted rounds are possible in NSDA Campus and do not require separate rooms. Determine the number of rooms based upon how many rooms are running simultaneously in a time slot, not how many “rounds” are happening in a room.


Purchasing NSDA Campus Rooms

Although one does not need to be an NSDA Member to purchase NSDA Campus rooms, they must have a free SpeechAndDebate.org website account to complete the purchase. For a quicker purchasing process, be sure to be signed into your SpeechAndDebate.org account before requesting rooms in Tabroom.com.

After creating a tournament and making decisions regarding entries, schedules, and fees, etc., tournament directors can purchase rooms in NSDA Campus. Under the Settings tab, select Tournament, then navigate to the Payment tab.

Add the total number of rooms needed for the tournament (each “room” is good for a 24-hour period beginning at 6:00 a.m in your local time zone). After filling in the quantity, click the button next to it that says "request". That will load a purchase form with the important details filled in and allow you to complete checkout.

You must divide and assign the rooms as needed in the tournament setup after purchase by clicking "Setup Campus Day Allocations" on the right side of the screen at Settings > Tournament > Payment.


Remember—rooms will not be activated until payment is received. The tournament must be created and paid for (a Purchase Order counts as payment) at least 30 minutes before the tournament starts. Rooms can be added after the original purchase at any time at least 30 minutes before the tournament begins. There are no exceptions to the policy and no refunds or credits available for unused rooms.

Configuring an Event as Online via NSDA Campus

Once an event has been created an online tab will appear.

Use the Online Event toggle to set the event to green (online)

Select NSDA Campus by clicking on the circle to the right of the text.

Make the appropriate selections under Identify Users in Online Rooms. This gives you the option to set how each user’s name is displayed in the video room. For example, Tab - George Brown, Judge - Alana Green, or Code - Student Name. Select the option that works best for your tournament.

The section titled Online Support Options gives tabulation staff the ability to list email(s) and instructions that will appear on online room landing pages.

Setting up Competition Rooms

Once your tournament’s rooms are activated, you can designate rooms for each day of the tournament. All settings are accessed by hovering over the Settings tab, clicking on Sites & Rooms, then selecting NSDA Campus in the upper right corner.


Setting up Utility Rooms (e.g., Judge Pooling, Tab Rooms, etc.)

After purchasing NSDA Campus rooms, hover over the Paneling tab and click on Rooms.

Select Utility and add a room name.

Determine if this room is for Entries, Judges, Coaches, or Tab, and whether it’s for a specific event, and click Save.

Remember—we suggest that rooms host no more than 15 people at a time. If you need a room that can easily manage more than 15 people, you may want to set up a room on a different platform (e.g., Zoom) for better quality.

To set up a utility room using an external platform like Zoom, follow the instructions above and change the dropdown from “NSDA Campus” to “External Service” next to the utility room in question. Then, paste a link to the external room and save.

If you plan to have a large group spanning multiple events to meet in one external room, create a separate utility room for each judge category and paste the same link for each utility room. For example, if you want all PF, LD, and CX judges to meet in one Judge Pooling room in Zoom, create a Judge Pooling room for PF judges, a separate Judge Pooling room for LD judges, and a separate Judge Pooling room for CX judges. Change all the dropdowns from “NSDA Campus” to “External Service” and paste the same Zoom link for all three of the utility rooms.

Remember- utility/squad rooms will not “show up” for users until the start time of your tournament. If you’d like to use them for registration or pre-tournament gatherings you must change/set your tournament start time to the time you’d like them to be available.


Purchasing NSDA Campus Rooms

NSDA Campus rooms can also be purchased from Settings > Tournament > Payments. Like last year, each NSDA Campus room covers one room for one day of use. If your tournament lasts multiple days, you will purchase sets of rooms for each day.

Tabroom.com will help you estimate the number of NSDA Campus rooms needed for one day of preliminary rounds. For debate, it will take into account whether you are flighting rounds, and for speech and Congress, it will divide your entry numbers by the default section size in your event settings. For the best estimate, make sure your entry numbers are final and your settings are complete! Make sure you double check the estimates with your own calculations.

When you are ready to purchase your NSDA Campus rooms, enter the number of rooms you wish to purchase and follow the payment instructions described above. Once payment is complete, don’t forget to allocate your purchased rooms to days at Settings > Tournament > Payment.

New: NSDA Campus with Observers

Based on your feedback, we are now testing a new type of NSDA Campus room that permits a limited number of coach observers to join the room during a round. For $14 per room per day, a tournament director can purchase rooms that allow coaches to designate observers on a per-round and per-entry basis. An event or division using Campus with Observers must do so for the entirety of the tournament; it is not possible to purchase normal NSDA Campus rooms for one day and Campus with Observer rooms for a different day.

Due to technical limits on the number of participants in Campus rooms, Campus with Observers is limited to 2 observers per entry in debate events or 1 observer per entry in speech events. In order to preserve the quality of competition, Campus with Observers cannot work with Congress. Campus with Observers is intended to be a way for coaches to observe their students in round; to allow non-coaches or large audiences to view rounds, please consider live streaming!

If your students are competing in an event using Campus with Observers rooms, you can designate observers from the tournament dashboard. Only Tabroom.com accounts with Coach/Administrator access to your school in Tabroom.com (which can be designated on the Access tab) may be designated as observers.

Coaches may designate observers on their school tournament dashboard on a per-entry basis. Those observers can then enter rooms from the tournament dashboard. Coaches can change observers at any time during a tournament. However, once one observer in speech or two in debate enters a room, no other coaches can enter that room for your entry, even if observer permissions are changed on the dashboard or if they leave the room.


Linking Student Performance Videos

Note: NSDA Campus does not provide a means for recording or storing videos, but it does allow tournaments to upload links to videos recorded elsewhere.

  1. Once your tournament is created, hover over the Entries tab and then click Data.
  2. Click the blue rectangle with the words Import CSV/Excel.
  3. Upload a CSV file that has columns for Code and Link. Detailed Instructions for Setting Up Asynchronous Speech Judging in Tabroom.com

Detailed Instructions for Setting Up Asynchronous Speech Judging in Tabroom.com

Holding Asynchronous Prelims and Synchronous Elims

For prelims, hover over Settings, then click on Events.


Select the event you wish to edit.


Click the Online tab, then set the event to “Asynchronous links to online videos.”

Upload your video links.

Once prelims are over, go back to Settings » Events » <Event> » Online, and set to “NSDA Campus.”

At this point, your rounds will be synchronous and will have links to NSDA Campus rooms.

Remember—The NSDA Campus rooms have to be purchased in advance and assigned to the correct day of your tournament. Detailed Instructions for Setting Up Asynchronous Speech Judging in Tabroom.com

Live Streaming Options

NSDA campus offers the ability to livestream elimination rounds. To enable this function:

First access the tournament and click settings. Then events, the specific event, and finally the online tab.

You should then see the button for enabling livestreams.


  • You can also livestream by using the free Open Broadcaster Software (OBS):

https://obsproject.com/

  • OBS allows anyone to stream what they see on their screen (including an NSDA Campus room) directly to YouTube or other streaming services.
  • For tournaments considering streaming via YouTube, please remember that YouTube requires the streamer to have a verified YouTube streaming account, which takes approximately 24 hours and must be set up before the day of the tournament.
  • You may also opt to use a different video platform (e.g., Zoom) for your later elimination rounds that you wish to stream. You can then save a URL to a specific external room in Settings » Sites & Rooms to be used on a Tabroom.com pairing.
  • You also have the option to host your elimination rounds on a public server that has the ability to livestream to YouTube enabled directly from NSDA Campus. However, this comes with significant downsides and is entirely at your own risk:


  • Security – While issues are unlikely, these public rooms are much less secure and susceptible to unauthorized access.
  • Quality – Additional observers in public rooms will degrade the audio/video quality, potentially significantly.
  • Stability – Since the public rooms are not under the NSDA’s control, we can’t guarantee their stability or performance.

Tips for Successful Setup on NSDA Campus

As you’re planning your tournament, past tournament hosts have discovered that these suggestions have made their tournaments run more smoothly on the NSDA Campus platform!
We will continue to add tips as they are shared with NSDA Staff.

Ensure all participants are linked on Tabroom in advance. For more information about linking accounts,please review this video.

  • Stagger start times - It works best to stagger round blasts/start times for different events by at least 5 minutes. This helps with server load, so that everyone at the tournament isn’t joining their room at the exact same time. Additionally, users will not be able to access rooms/rounds until after the time your tournament “starts.” Consider setting your tournament start time as an hour before your rounds are scheduled.
  • Less “in room” wait time - The less time users are in rooms the better! No need for users to be in rooms for thirty minutes to an hour before start time!
  • Back up Plan - Some users may not be able to access NSDA Campus rooms for reasons neither you nor the NSDA can control (such as school content filters). Have a backup plan for rooms outside of the NSDA Campus platform for those unique situations. Consider using Zoom, Google Meets, or other virtual platforms.
  • Understand the NSDA’s Backup Procedures - In the event of a widespread technical issue, the NSDA has multiple backup plans to switch infrastructure and ensure Campus will continue to operate. In that case, the best thing to do is have your participants close their rooms, wait 5-10 minutes, and come back in via Tabroom/Speechwire. There usually will be no need to postpone rounds more than that, repair, or take other drastic action unless told otherwise by the NSDA.

How do Flighted Rounds work?

  • Each flight will have its own unique NSDA Campus Room and Link - BUT this does not mean you need to purchase additional rooms. Purchase the number of rooms you would need if you were hosting “in-person” because that is the number of rounds you are running simultaneously.

For example, if an LD division has 60 entries and will be flighted, you need a minimum of 15 rooms.

  • Between flights, judges will need to leave one NSDA Campus room and join another.

What do we need to do to ensure we can access NSDA Campus from school?

Direct all users to first test both the competition space and the practice space here by going to https://campus.speechanddebate.org/
Here are the websites you’ll want to make sure you’ve whitelisted:

  • *.jitsi.net
  • meet.jit.si
  • web-cdn.jitsi.net
  • meet-east.speechanddebate.org
  • meet.speechanddebate.org
  • Campus.speechanddebate.org


Additionally, the following ports will need to be opened:

  • 80 TCP: HTTP
  • 443 TCP: HTTPS
  • 10000 UDP: Web-RTC


Your IT people may ask which domains/IP addresses to use for the above ports. Because the video servers are dynamically scaled and do not have fixed hostnames or IP’s, at least the UDP port will need to be open to all IP addresses. If they require a range, they can use Amazon’s IP list and filter by the AWS regions for us-east-1, us-east-2, us-west-1, and us-west-2:

What happens if something goes wrong?

First, don’t panic! The NSDA has multiple backup plans, and can almost always get things back on track in a short timeframe. In the event of major issues, we can also move participants over to backup servers, either piecemeal or all at once, as the situation requires. Each of these steps only takes a few minutes, so stay patient. Unless you hear otherwise from NSDA Staff, there’s no need to move all rooms to a different platform, redo round pairings, or postpone your schedule. Most glitches can be dealt with by a short 5-10 minute pause: have everyone leave their rooms, wait a few minutes for us to fix the problem, then try to re-enter their room via Tabroom/Speechwire. Repeatedly reloading the page will just make things worse. Once the NSDA has remedied the source of the problem, rooms should go back to working again as normal.

If you experience problems, attempt to determine whether the issue is actually with NSDA Campus, or with individual participants. If you’re only getting reports of issues from some participants, the issue is very unlikely to be with Campus itself. If every room simultaneously starts having issues (e.g. mass disconnections or “kick outs”), it is more likely to be a Campus-wide issue.

We now have a centralized status dashboard for all NSDA Services: NSDA STATUS

In the event of any glitches or downtime with Campus or Tabroom (or other NSDA services), this site will be kept up to date with the issue, the planned fix, and any expected time for resolution. We strongly suggest you check this site first before emailing or calling the NSDA office - it will be the fastest way to get info out to everyone. We'll communicate any info we have via the site, and you can direct your participants there as well to get the all clear.

If you have any additional questions, please email info@speechanddebate.org.

Quick Links

Need Support

When emailing, please send a screenshot when possible. This helps us to diagnose any issues more quickly and get you answers more efficiently!

  • During business hours (Monday through Friday, 8am to 5pm CST) please email info@speechanddebate.org with your questions.
  • During the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) if you feel there is an issue with NSDA Campus specifically that needs to be brought to our attention, please email our tech team at help@tabroom.com and our NSDA Campus team will route your concerns to the relevant staff member.
  • At any point in the week, if you have a Tabroom related question or concern please contact the Tabroom support team at help@tabroom.com.
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