For the education function of the university, MOOCs might partially end it. Of course, a better way to make it obsolete is through direct plug in learning like in the movie The Matrix. See Elon Musk’s Neuralink.

For the research function of the university, I am not sure, particularly for basic & fundamental research that would not be worthwhile, in the short term, to be conducted in company R&D labs. The only good alternative I see is distributed open source & open access projects like Wikipedia & GitHub.

The other thing that needs to end with this is the journal publishing regime. We need better income generation for content creators of the academic sort. At the moment I can only see potential in some paid ads system, some tokenized platform like Steemit, via Patreon or Crowdfunding.

But university is also an important place for networking with potentially successful people. And there’s already Facebook & LinkedIn for that!!

From my quora answer here:
https://www.quora.com/Besides-MOOCs-what-are-some-ways-technology-can-be-used-to-make-higher-education-and-the-research-university-obsolete/answer/Petr-Misan?share=4664ac9c