On TV, you might want to contact Elizabeth Traube at Wesleyan, who teaches a very good course that escapes the pitfalls you describe. The books you describe look interesting too.

As for indepentant study course, my approach is to explain to students that I am happy to help them design the course, and to meet with them to talk about the reading, but that I can’t DO the reading. Instead, they will have to explain to me what its about–when me meet, I try to really figure out what the reading is about and what it says, by asking them questions as though they were a colleague. It doesn’t always work, but with good students its really great to put them in a position where if they can’t explain the text then we can’t have a conversation about it–it sort of moves the discussion away from “pretend” to “real” and I find myself questioning them in a way I never would if I knew what the answer was or that the text DIDN’T answer the questions I had about it. In the best of all possible worlds I even learn a lot.