I have always thought that Universities should offer self-contained courses, with original homework and practice, specially in technical courses. Books should be considered as reference/reinforcement materials, never a requirement for anything.
After the irruption of Coursera and Udacity, I heard a couple of professors in my university talking about the impact those courses can have in the future. They saw themselves in the future as TAs of those courses, where the students only "use" them to clarify concepts.
If you ask me, TA should be the more glorious position. There's just no point in speaking the same thing in front of 200 students every (half) year in front of 200 people with little to no interactivity. So what's the point of having that person in front of the class and not some recording?
Oh, right, there isn't one. There hasn't been for some years now, but the academia has had neither internal nor external incentives to innovate. Some might say giving the students the best possible experience should be an intrinsic motivation for professors. A shame it doesn't work that way.
I think though that TAs in Coursera/Udacity are not active enough. Given that tens of thousands (hundreds?) take a course, they can't afford to be. It makes me think that this model is not sustainable either.
I mean, in our day and age, dabbling in an area of science/art should not be a hard or expensive thing to do. And if you're willing to find your own information, it mostly isn't. But if everyone wanted to dabble in computer science and learn some basics, there just aren't enough TAs in the world to provide assistance.
There certainly would be enough learners, though! And I think that's a much more sustainable model. Udacity and Coursera both have active forums, I've heard Salman Khan mention it, and even in that "Intoduction to AI class" that did not have discussion forums from the start, people organized study groups, forums and subreddits all on their own.
Let's make it "cool" to study together and help others. Social routines will do the rest.
This is exactly the way the courses at my University (Cambridge, UK) worked. The lectures covered all relevant course material and problem sheets were given out (also available online http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/examples/).
Each course had a short list of recommended books and usually the lecturer would give a few comments about each book at the start of the course. These were for supplementary reference and were widely available in the libraries. I bought one text book during my course for my favourite area, so I could keep it after University. Otherwise the libraries were completely adequate.
I studied maths, I know that computer science and physics were the same. With arts subjects students used so many books that it wouldn't be reasonable to by them. I am not aware of any courses having required textbooks but I don't know for certain.
Notes like http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1112/LogicProof/logic-notes... were pretty common in CompSci. Often the notes were sufficient on their own, with pointers to further reading if required (see page 1 on the linked notes). With the libraries, it was quite easy to manage without buying any books.
After the irruption of Coursera and Udacity, I heard a couple of professors in my university talking about the impact those courses can have in the future. They saw themselves in the future as TAs of those courses, where the students only "use" them to clarify concepts.