Libraries: are they the answer for issues of MOOCs?

Libraries has survived the internet revolution which was dominated by the deep plunge in interest in books. Today, they function as intellectual hubs, spaces for living. Will they survive the next revolution in education? I even wonder if they couldn't be the model how universities transform themselves under the age of MOOCs.

[Update 1.5.2014: It is actually now becoming a reality. Coursera facilitate that through so called learning hubs.]

Yesterday in my blog post I compared MOOCs to theatres and movies. I really like the metaphore and I think that the story for MOOCs might be similar.

I mentioned several issues which are obviously against abandoning universities as a system for providing tertiary education.  The thing is that university today is an unique space which brings together brilliant people tuned to same frequency: students, researchers, thinkers.

One of the examples might be the Silicon Valley.  Universities in the Bay area (Stanford, Berkeley, and others) has attracted the most brilliant minds of the world (both students and professors). Together with the right mind set and enough of money this created absolutely unique place where people like William Shockley, Gordon Moore, or Steve Jobs could thrive. But if those inventors and innovators wouldn't be in this environment making networks and sharing ideas, we might not have computers as we know them today. Hewlite and Packard or Steve Jobs and Wozniak might have never met. 

Yet, there are several problems with universities:

• It is extremely expensive and not available to everyone who would deserve it and could prosper from it.
• It is extremely inefficient.  Why should I have a worse teacher than a guy lucky enough to be born in US or be rich enough to go there? Why there should  be two teachers teaching exactly same thing? Why there should be thousands of people teaching the same thing?
• Today, it is mostly focused on examination, not on teaching itself. People are taught to succeed at an exam which is often irrelevant to the real world.

As it was pointed many times, this education system hasn't changed since 14th century. But how to abandon the inefficient teaching concept while maintaining the talent accumulation? 

Sitting in a library at a technical university (NTU in Singapore), it dawned on me. Libraries were able to transform themselves over the past decade or so from quite places where people came to borrow and read a book to places full of life. Here people study, interact, eat, sleep, and spend most of their day = simply nowadays people virtually live in libraries. The majority are students but you can find even some freelancers working on their job. And there is only a few who will actually borrow a book. They overcome the "book" or computer crisis with style.  It is the atmosphere everyone here seeks! 

And if you ask anyone why he came to study here when he could stay at home and save 1 hour to travel here and return. Your answer will probably be something like: I can focus only in a library. 

And that's maybe the answer to this problem. We can preserve universities through a a building similar to a library: with its quiet zones to study,  community areas to interact, sport zones to chill out. It will be place where we consume all these MOOC courses, it will be place where in the late evening you go to grab a coffee and there you meet the future Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page being excited about a new thing you learned. There will be organized events which will encourage networking and discussion. There will be organized clubs, sport events... There will come people from near by research centers or HR people from companies. 

These new libraries could be scattered all around the world as much as libraries are everywhere today in every smaller town. But money here really doesn't matter. It's only about you having a laptop, headphones, chair and table. And you still can receive the best education available even if your library is not the best. And during the whole lifetime. Not only instantly over 5 years of your life.

And you should be able to come to any of these places around the world just for few days because the travelling will be so cheap.

Universities then do what they do best: they could converge into research institutes which will collaborate with these new libraries. They will cooperate on creating new MOOC courses... 

Many people are nostalgic about their student life. With continuous education through MOOC courses you could  have student life for the rest of your life.