Here are some ways to help yourself when you think the academics are not "doing enough" to help you get through a course.  Richard Felder is a famous engineering academic who offers some good advice in his article How to Survive Engineering School.  A similar article by him which covers similar ground is entitled An Engineering Student Survival Guide.

For postgraduates here are two article on how to operate as a postgraduate student.  The first is by a former PhD thesis supervisor of mine (Ian Witten) Getting Students Started: A Tale of Two Courses and the second How to be a good graduate student/advisor. 

For those students writing a dissertation, here are some valuable words of wisdom from Olin Shivers of MIT: Dissertation Advice.