Gender and diversity in engineering MOOCs, a first Appraisal

The underrepresentation of women in engineer sciences is a well-known and vastly discussed fact, hence there are quite a few concepts on how to increase the interest for engineer topics in education settings [1]. But what happens when the classroom is virtualised and students from all over the world can participate freely and open in a technical class, like it?s the case in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)? Why do some students succeed in these course and others drop out? And is this linked to gender or diversity factors? The presented work searches to answer the question for gender and diversity issues in the successful participation and the drop out behaviour and reasons of MOOCs of the Delft University of Technology at its virtual campus DelftX, which is using edX, the non-profit platform for online education provided by MIT.To answer these questions, the authors cooperate in a series of online surveys, undertaken with students participating online in the engineering courses at DelftX. First analysis show that, even considering the generally low ratio of female students in engineering courses [2,3], female students show a higher drop out rate at surveyed technical MOOCs than the male. The diversity factor age seem not to influence the drop out behaviour, neither was the higher attrition rate caused by early dropout, but happened throughout the course. On the other hand, we find in all courses female students to be younger than male ones and in line with that, we see less female students in the older age groups above 34 years.These and other matters related with gender and diversity will be investigated in upcoming MOOCs at DelftX. Gender and diversity relevant aspects of engineering education have to be proven for their use in MOOCs.