I am in 100% agreement about out of class time being vital to learning. As a non-physics major I am only enrolled in a 102 course. Other than my high school physics (6 years ago) I have had no other formal schooling on the subject. My professor expects us to have read all the material, posts homework online (which is always multiple choice, but which we must explain and show our work for), and expects us to do labs for. The labs, I will admit, have been less useful than I would have hoped, unfortunately my professor has no direct influence on those.
My course is only a 3 hour course, I think the average grade is a low C, yet I am only in deficit by .4% of my overall grade. The point is not to brag about a 102 grade at all...simply to show the correlation between outside time spent and the grade. I have done all the homework, 95% of the reading, and every lab. In addition, I am in regular communication with my professor and hold study sessions outside of class for the other students so as to encourage them to spend the time outside of class as well. All in all for this 3 hour course I spend, on average, and additional 15-20 hours outside of class per week...I have a couple friends in the course who I consider to be of similar intelligence to me that are doing nowhere near as well because they don't come to the study sessions and more or less use me as a crutch on the labs and homework. Sometimes my desire to help others clouds my judgment on what exactly constitutes "help" but that is all part of learning how to teach effectively, no?
Anyway, the point of my long winded statement is simply to say, "Yup, you need to spend the time to learn the stuff." I love that my professor writes his exams to reflect an understanding of the concepts and not memorization of material. I have learned more in my 102 course than in any of my other courses because he expected me to...if he hadn't I probably would have coasted by (because, let's face it, coming in I was NOT excited about taking physics as a com major...turns out I love it!)