This article analyses three of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) gathered by the 2030 Agenda and adopted by the United Nations, and how online educational models may help to reach these goals. Specifically, the three goals discussed through this article are: (i) Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all (Goal 4); (ii) reduce inequality within and among countries (Goal 10); and (iii) take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts (Goal 13). This work delves fundamentally into aspects related to online engineering education, such as the impact of the carbon footprint in online education, the reduction of geographical barriers and the social gap, and the complete online accessibility to the educational environment. Finally, this article presents the case of the International University of La Rioja with its 100% online methodology, and approximately 42,000 students distributed throughout the world. This institution is supported by tools that facilitate engineering training for people with reduced mobility and who are geographically dispersed, reducing the carbon footprint through remote training.

This paper describes an ongoing educational innovation project focused of improving the practical education of engineering students, in the context of a purely online education model. A rich toolbox of online, virtual and remote labs is described. Using this toolbox, several strategies for providing practical education and their combinations will be evaluated, and a set of guidelines and recommendations for education practitioners will be provided as the main output of this research.

Practical activities and laboratories, where the students handle hardware devices, are an important part of the curriculum in STEAM degrees. In face-to-face learning, the students go to a specific classroom where the hardware is available. However, laboratories are one of the challenges of distance education, due to the impossibility of the students attending classes at a certain place. This is especially relevant since the COVID-19 pandemic, thanks to the increase of students enrolled in distance education. Different approaches to tackle this problem have been adopted, ranging from mixed models where lectures are online but physical attendance to laboratories is required to purely virtual models where virtual worlds or augmented reality have been used to simulate the real hardware. This paper presents the case of study of a flexible laboratory for the use of Arduino in a Computer Technology course with 153 students, geographically distributed in Spain and Latin America. The goal of the case study is to study the impact of such a flexible laboratory in the course, based on four fundamental parameters: student access to the online lectures, participation in the course and marks obtained, and satisfaction surveys. The results show that students have increased their marks by 28.8% and their class attendance by 247.18%, doing more elaborate and complex work than in previous courses. Therefore, it is considered that they have satisfactorily integrated the knowledge acquired during the subject, and the projects with Arduino in Computer Technology have an impact on the flexibility and personalization of the education, motivate students and increase its educational productivity and effect on the quality of education, influencing the learning experience.