For years, students have had to search through volume after volume of books before finding the right formula — but no more. Josephine says that "with books being digitized and available through full text search capabilities, they can find that formula quite easily."
Keller expects that, eventually, there won't be any books on the shelves at all.
Given the nature of engineering, that actually comes in handy. Engineering uses some basic formulas but is generally a rapidly changing field — particularly in specialties such as software and bioengineering. Traditional textbooks have rarely been able to keep up.
"It allows our faculty to change examples," he says," to put in new homework problems ... and lectures and things like that in almost a real-time way.
According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.
I even go so far as sending my students the link to my rating. That way they can do it and I'm making it easy for them to do. That's when the site becomes useful, because in the aggregate you can look at how that professor performed.
She sees negative comments as opportunities to improve her teaching. Most students post to the site unprompted by their teachers, and a lot of them go there to talk smack.
My mother could be rating me. My worst enemy could be rating me. I could be rating myself. My colleague with a grudge against me could be rating me. And that called into question the whole legitimacy of the site.