A few years ago the prospect of “online” debate was thrown around as a sort of sci fi scenario for the distant, distant future. Debate has always been slow to incorporate technology (look at how long paperless took) and so when everything went online in a very short period of time it was, historically, very impressive.
Now that the pandemic appears to be winding down people are trying to figure out where do we go from here. There are many arguments for and against in person tournaments as opposed to online tournaments, so I think it’s important that to have this discussion we do a little impact calculus.
What I mean is that when I was a an online or hybrid judge there were certainly things about it I didn’t like or found annoying.
-Tournaments that had over aggressive tech checks
-balancing east and west coast schedules
-tech difficulties that delayed the round 3s of minutes
These are all things that when debaters/debate coaches experience them they are likely to complain about- loudly and to anyone who will listen. Complaining is a debate tradition. At in person tournaments that don’t have dinner almost every team meal consists of 2 hours of debaters and coaches complaining about everything that went wrong during an in-person day
-the outlets weren’t in the ideal location
-the desks didn’t fit together perfectly/the other team stole the table
-we had 5 judge changes for round 1 Saturday morning
No one at these dinners ever said “because of these minor irritants we should quit debate”. Don’t get me wrong- people have had big problems with debate and quit, what I mean is that usually people are pretty good at distinguishing between minor annoyances and big problems.
Not so in discussions of online debate. There is a segment of people who want very badly to return to in person debate and that desire is perfectly reasonable- if you like in person debate and miss it than obviously you want to make it happen again and in discussions about it you might get heated.
But if we are to have a serious discussion about the merits of online debate vs in person we have to be able to separate the background “complaining” from serious argument. The claim that numbers are way down in a world of only online debate- that is a very serious argument. The claim that you had to get up a bit earlier because the tournament was on east coast time is just not.
Similarly, the claim that debaters with limited financial resources or other constraints that prevent them from attending 10 national circuit tournaments in person benefit from online debate is a serious argument. Saying “online debate is better because I get to stay home with my dog”, as persuasive as it seems, is not a real argument either.
Essentially we need to be cognizant of two of our favorite impact criteria
-Magnitude- how many people does this effect/how big is the effect on their debate life
-Probability- how likely is it that this impact is not “mitigated” by defense
Take Scheduling- many tournaments have had great online schedules, other tournaments have had absolutely terrible ones (side barring the specifics of this for now). You would think that over time online tournaments would, as the mighty states do in federalism, learn from this laboratory of democracy and eventually drift towards all tournaments having the best schedule. This didn’t happen, the market is a failure people. That doesn’t mean online debate is doomed- it should be easy for a group of coaches or a debate organization to step in and apply some standards. So while scheduling isn’t perfect, its easily fixable.
Now take “our school doesn’t give us any money”. What’s the easy fix there? Well there isn’t one. So if the debate just came down to
Bad Schedule vs Schools getting to participate who otherwise wouldn’t
Hopefully its a 3-0 for online.
An email we got recently from a coach explained what some of these constraints could look like:
I coach at Kickapoo in Springfield, Missouri. Our state association has rules that forbid Missouri teams from attending many of the major tournaments where our students get exposure, good judge feedback, etc. These rules include: not being able to debate on Mondays (which excludes literally all of the majors), not being able to travel outside of 250 miles from our state border (which limits out much of the area east of Chicago, north of Dowling, south of Arkansas, and west of Dallas), not allowing us to start before the second weekend in October (which limits out most of the KS policy tournaments), and limiting us to 11 tournaments per year in total (only one of which can be during the school year but after districts – so Missouri teams have to choose between the TOC and NDCA if we were fortunate enough to qualify to both). They allow several of these rules to have workarounds when the tournaments are online which has enabled both us and Truman to qualify to and compete at the TOC this year. Both teams finished with winning records and Truman broke to the run-off round Sunday night.
While we are fighting with our state association to get some of these rules changed, I do think it is worth considering if the drawbacks for students who attend in person but have to compete against a team debating virtually outweigh the benefits for students who get to compete, even in a less than ideal fashion, by having hybrid tournaments.
I would offer the following defense of allowing a SMALL subset of teams to enter in person tournaments in a hybrid manner. For example, teams from UDL schools, schools who are not allowed to travel by state or district guidelines, etc. would be allowed to enter up to two entries who could debate online. This is similar to needs-based scholarships for debate camps while still encouraging tournaments to host mostly in person. I imagine that many (I know I would be on this side) of coaches and competitors from teams like ours would be willing to allow the judge to be in person with the other team in the same room which puts us at a competitive disadvantage. However, like I mentioned, competing in the first place – even at a disadvantage – is probably better than not competing at all. I would even be willing to have tournaments charge a little more for teams that compete online as entry/ team fees to off-set some of the costs for Zoom licenses, viewing computers for judges/ competitors/ etc. I see it as similar to how the openev project allows students who don’t go to camp to get access to some of the information. Obviously, going to camp in person and getting the lectures, practice rounds, and relationships is priceless, but we have decided that having access to some for everyone is good. I think this same principle applies here too.
I think this email and its explanation of basically a “hybrid PIC” is good way to start this discussion of how do we find the right balance, because it perfectly distinguishes between the important arguments I’m trying to highlight above, and the “complaints”. I have talked to a few people about this/slightly different ideas, and they always have a list of objections. The thing I noticed about these objections is that the amount of effort required to fix these objections is always DRAMATICALLY LESS than any possible alternative.
This is basically a back and forth between me and another coach where they raise objections to limited hybrid and I point out how easy the fixes are:
Them: I judged hybrid at one. The tech was kind of a disaster.
Me: The cost of top tier tech is less – WAY LESS- than travel to one tournament. Tournaments can also help facilitate this on site using money from fees. Yes its not something we do now, but its not really more complicated than ordering food for 500 people.
Them: Yea I guess. But also there is a big competitive advantage to the team in person.
Me: Sure, hybrid teams know and accept that though, if they think its too big they don’t have to go.
Them: I suppose.
This is basically how the conversation went for like 20 different objections. I won’t bore you with the whole thing because I’m not really saying anything that is smart, these are all pretty obvious solutions. I am not very smart, so if I can come up with them I am confident the rest of debate can (and HAS, for example when I judged Hybrid at the Texas tournament someone from the tournament made sure that one of the other judges on the panel was sort of the “tech check” person to make sure everything was running smoothly).
So what are we really trying to figure out here? We are trying to figure out is if
(number of people added to debate via hybrid)> (number of people lost due to some online element)
I think three things would help clarify discussions over this formula
- There is a difference in terms of negative impact from “online only” to “hybrid”- this may be the most powerful piece of impact defense the pro hybrid side has. People don’t like online/want to see their friends in person. If you have 1/6 prelim debates at a tournament that is hybrid is anyone going go to say “this one debate reduced the benefit of in person debate to zero”? I don’t think so, this to me is a perfect case for “reasonability”- yes in an ideal world all debates for you would be in person, but the difference between all and all but one is not super meaningful.
- The difference on the positive side between “no debate” and “Got to debate online” is massive. Even if its only for a very small group of students, say one team of two, the benefit of getting to go debate in a tournament you wouldn’t otherwise is very large. Does the benefit to those 2 students outweigh the slight disadvantage to their 12 opponents? I think that it very much does.
- Not all tournaments have to allow the same hybrid “exemptions”. One common criticism of online tournaments is that because there is no travel or physical room requirements at a school/university the possibility that they can become a blatant cash grab is very high. While it is good to have as many students as possible debate, this shouldn’t be used cynically as a justification for making a lot of money. If a tournament has 500 teams because they allowed schools with no debate programs in for free- that is good. If a tournament has 500 teams because they let in anyone with no concern for how it effects the tournament/competitors and basically runs a debate factory farm-that is bad. There were obviously online tournaments that did this, but there were also in person tournaments who did their version of it. Running a bad tournament is not unique to online or in person, and most of the things that make a tournament good or bad are easily changed by the people running it.
So, to sort of summarize/end this part
-not all tournaments have to be the same
-big picture, it seems hard to defend “no hybrid period” because the benefits of participation are very large, and the risk of downsides is very small
-Some good examples of justifications for a school competing hybrid are financial constraints and rules against travel
These seem fairly straightforward to me, but obviously they are not or I wouldn’t be writing this. In the next part we will go over more of the objections to online/hybrid.
HS Impact 
Great article!