The University of Pittsburgh employs two innovative classroom capture technologies: Janus and MediaSite.

Janus was originally created to address the needs of faculty who use wheelchairs. It does so by allowing them to remain seated and facing their students, while at the same time, making annotations on a touch-sensitive panel and projecting these annotations for the entire class to view.  Janus also fills an important need in large lecture halls where students often have difficulty seeing notes traditionally written on a blackboard. 

MediaSite captures the audio and video of the instructor, the instructor’s presentation, and the instructor’s annotations. This tool facilitates the archiving of lectures, thereby enabling students to access them online. At their convenience, students can play back an entire  lecture, including the audio/video of the instructor, the presentation, and annotations. MediaSite can also support distance education instruction by broadcasting an instructor’s presentation in real time over the Internet.

The following table lists the key features of each application