The Flipped Classroom[1] is one alternative that has gained some momentum. Basically, watch the lecture on your own before class, so classroom time can be interactive.
One example of how terrible these services are was from my foreign language class. Pearson (fuck Pearson) has a service for that which strictly disallows any international keyboard input, and to write non a-z characters you would have to use their very clunky ui. And for their video player would not allow you to rewind or skip forward in any useful way.
I ended up writing some greasemonkey scripts to re render all of their web content. While doing so, I figured out that they also send all of their answers to homework in the html, so I also wrote a script that could allow you to see the answers - which I ended up using sometimes when questions had multiple correct answers but I couldn't figure out which one the homework system wanted(i.e. different words possible, multiple valid verb conjugations valid, etc.).
It's a shame that online textbook/lecture/homework systems for college coursework tend to be so terribly designed - the most difficult part of coursework shouldn't have to be figuring out how to interface with a clunky web ui. I think there is serious potential for a company to make a well-designed system for coursework if they could market it to colleges correctly - maybe survey students on what they like/don't like about existing products and show to colleges that these systems are seriously lacking. Unfortunately, the big textbook companies seem to have a monopoly on curriculum design, so getting these systems to mesh well with the curriculum could be difficult.