Barring any obscene Flash or heavily AJAX’d pages a bash script using cURL would readily automate the fetching of course materials.

I feel your pain though, as of 3 years ago when I graduated, Kent State was just getting into the whole course-materials-on-the-portal thing. Being a CS student we had been doing that for years, albeit on the very raw pages turned out by the grey-hairs in that department.

Kent is improving though, they just switched from internal email (POP/SMTP, slow as hell, 50MB limit) to GMail with its sweet delicious IMAP and multi-gigabyte storage. Actually makes my lifetime alumni email account worth having.

The trick is to provide constructive feedback to the right people. That includes professors (who are often just as frustrated as students), technical staff (be nice to the low level techs and they’ll hand out contact info for people who can accept feedback and do something about it), and of course the board/deans/execs (approached casually at dinners and such).

Good luck to the missus on her exams!