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Although aerospace traditionally has always had a multidisciplinary approach to engineering and design, the increasing complexity of aircraft and spacecraft and the rapid digitization within the aerospace industry has led to a large number of related engineering and scientific disciplines such as electrical engineers, computer scientist to work much more directly within the aerospace domain than before. Next to that there is a shortage of highly trained engineers worldwide to meet demand. As a result, there is a clear need to provide basic knowledge to non-aerospace engineers working in the field and to motivate and attract more people to engineering and aerospace in particular. This paper details how the creation of a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) at an introductory level in Aerospace Structures and Materials provides an efficient and fit-for-purpose tool to achieve both aims. The paper will discuss the course design, the course set up, the course evaluation and how the course fits within the online learning philosophy of Delft University of Technology. It will use learning analytics to analyze our learners and their needs.

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The gender divide for women in the engineering domain in academia is still very large today, even though most institutions are committed to changing this. Although there are slow improvements in the number of women working in academic positions in Engineering, the Netherlands, in particular, is still lagging badly behind the rest of Europe with women making up only 17.6% of all full professors in the engineering domain and for 25.7% in the entire academic domain. This is despite many efforts across the board to improve this situation. The situation is even worse in the field of Aerospace Engineering and within this field, the lack of progress is not unique to the Netherlands with similar issues being reported in the United States of America and wider afield. This paper reports on research on the capacity building among women required within the aerospace engineering domain to reach the commonly defined critical mass percentage of 30% of women full professors using metrics on career progress and on as well as labour market data on the career development of Aerospace graduates to show where potential new interventions can be made.