Beyond Intelligence: What Should We Teach When Thinking Is No Longer Scarce?

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Odiseo · Issue 60 | Autumn 2026

In the third issue of Garimau, the communication scholar Salvador Doblas Arrebola reflects on young people, education and artificial intelligence. His answers are worth reading slowly, and worth arguing with.

Written by: Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea

Before writing about education and artificial intelligence, it is worth asking who will read this. You are probably reading on a screen, between two other things. You may already have asked an AI a question this week. And there is a fair chance you are giving these lines less attention than you would like, because everything around them is competing for it too.

That is not a complaint. It is simply where we are, and it should change how an article like this is written. If the reader lives in noise, the text cannot add to it. It should slow down, ask more than it answers, and leave some room to think. McLuhan told us the medium is the message. An article about critical thinking that only delivered conclusions would contradict itself before the second paragraph.

So this is less a summary than a conversation with a friend’s ideas.

A line of free verse

Salvador Doblas Arrebola holds a doctorate in Communication and a Master’s in Strategic Management and Innovation in Communication. He teaches Advertising Creativity at the Faculty of Communication and Marketing, and on the Master’s in Cognitive Sciences, both at the University of Málaga. He is also someone who walks, dances, meditates and gives time to philanthropic projects, and who says, without irony, that teaching, research and communication are not three jobs but one vocation.

Salvador Doblas Arrebola with his students

Salvador Doblas Arrebola with his students.

He is, in the Spanish expression, a verso suelto: a line of free verse that refuses to rhyme with the rest. That is exactly why he fits so naturally in Garimau, a magazine that lives somewhere between art and thought. His interview in issue no. 3 is gentle in tone and demanding in substance. What follows is my reading of it, and my own translations of his words.

Doubt as a method

As freethinkers and, I hope, as humanists, we look at the world in order to keep doubting. Doubt is not a weakness. It is the force that sends us looking for new answers when the old ones stop working. It is also the right way to read Salvador: not to agree with him, but to think alongside him.

His starting point is Paulo Freire’s idea that nobody educates anybody else; people educate one another, through the world they share. From there he draws a clear picture of what young people need. Information is not enough; it is everywhere. They need orientation, meaning and ethical references, and help to think, discern and build a conscious relationship with themselves and with the world. Every student, he says, brings a story, a question and a particular way of looking.

This is where critical thinking stops being a subject and becomes a condition. Without it, everything else a young person learns is exposed to manipulation, to the bubble, to the slow flattening of thought that Salvador warns about later in the interview.

And there is an uncomfortable consequence. If we want young people to think critically, we need teachers who do, and who know how to pass it on. These are competences, not personal virtues, and they can be trained. Yet teacher training rarely addresses them. So the question is not only what we teach young people. It is who teaches the teachers to doubt.

Here a little Socratic irony is useful. Can we really change people, and the world? Every educator hopes so. But transformation has an uncomfortable twin, and its name is indoctrination. History is full of people who knew exactly how humanity should be improved, and who were capable of the worst precisely because they were so sure. Socrates’ way out was to know that he did not know. Perhaps the only legitimate way to change someone is to help them resist being changed, including by us.

Salvador’s own formula for the teacher is elegant: demanding but close, clear but flexible, able to build trust without losing depth. Each pair holds two forces in balance, and I would sign it. But I wonder whether balance is enough. Today’s teacher may need to be more polyfaceted:

  • able to say “I don’t know” in public
  • able to be wrong in front of a class, and to show how one corrects oneself
  • able to cause useful discomfort, not only to build trust
  • present with the body as well as the word
  • able to listen, which is more than being close

Salvador himself says that the teacher learns in every classroom. That idea deserves to be the formula’s first line, not its footnote.

Connection is not conversation

Salvador is precise about technology. The medium, he reminds us, is never a neutral channel: it shapes how we look and what we pay attention to. With Sherry Turkle, he warns that constant but fragmented connection can quietly replace conversation, and with it the human density of real encounter, which needs time, attention and a certain vulnerability. His conclusion is not to reject technology. It is to stop it from replacing the most valuable part of what happens between people.

Beyond intelligence

On artificial intelligence, Salvador’s stance is prudence and interest at once. It is a powerful tool for analysis, production and organisation, but it cannot replace human perspective or critical judgement. The question, he says, is not what technology can do, but what we decide to do with it. Used with judgement, it expands what we can do. Adopted without reflection, it impoverishes language, homogenises thought and weakens us as subjects.

In Odiseo we asked, in the spring of 2023, what AI would cost us. This autumn we explained why the Escola now teaches it rather than ignoring it. I want to push the question one step further, because most of today’s debate quietly assumes that AI will stay roughly as it is: a tool, in our hands.

What if it doesn’t? What if its cognitive capacity keeps growing, and matches or overtakes ours in more and more fields? Then the question changes.

It is no longer how to use the tool well, but what education is for, once intelligence is no longer scarce.

That is the question behind Education Beyond Intelligence, the programme we will run on board this October. Its modules are about what lies beyond intelligence:

  • theatre, to work on body, presence and action
  • music, to work on listening, attention and inner discipline
  • ethics and emotions, to work on responsibility and the common good
  • learning how to learn, and understanding how teams actually work

None of this competes with a machine. All of it becomes more important as machines improve. Salvador asks what place we want to keep for consciousness, creativity and human responsibility. I cannot think of a better syllabus.

Did you know?

Odiseo first asked what artificial intelligence would cost us in its Spring 2023 issue. Three years later, the question has changed: not what AI costs, but what education is for.

On what ground do we build?

Salvador believes the future will be different and more mediated by technology, but not automatically better or worse. The challenge, he says, is human rather than technical: what kind of coexistence do we want?

It is worth noticing what he does not mention. There is no religion in his answers. His foundations are education, judgement, responsibility, and a sensitivity that is almost spiritual. For centuries, religions provided much of the shared ground on which values were built. If that ground is no longer common, what replaces it? Can humanism alone carry the weight? I do not know. I suspect the question matters more than any quick answer.

What I do see is that the ground is shifting. More and more is built on fictitious realities. Truth risks becoming whatever the majority happens to believe. Reactionary movements grow by offering simple certainties in an uncertain world. The information bubbles Salvador cites from Eli Pariser are not a technical detail; they are the machinery of this process, because they only let us meet people who already agree with us.

On board, we will try something modest in response. Each participant will write before reading anyone else, so that every voice exists before the group can absorb it. People will be paired for contrast, not affinity. Disagreement will be recorded and kept, not dissolved into consensus. And signing the final declaration will be voluntary, with declining counted as a legitimate choice. None of this hands anyone the truth. It builds the conditions for people to think for themselves in front of others. That may be the only foundation that does not harden into dogma.

Building paths

At the Escola we try to build paths with teachers and with students, rather than handing them a route already drawn. Our scale is limited, and so is our capacity. But every achievement counts, and there is one way to multiply it: through teachers. Each teacher who learns to doubt, to listen and to accompany will reach students we will never meet. That is why training trainers matters so much to us, and why our CHIRON network of specialised teachers exists.

From where I stand, training professionals in logistics, transport and trade, AI is already changing jobs and skills. The answer cannot only be technical. It has to be humanist: educating people who can judge, decide and take responsibility, precisely because machines will increasingly do the rest. Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar, wrote Machado. There is no path; the path is made by walking.

A serene resistance

Salvador closes his interview with an idea I would like to keep. In times of haste, noise and excess stimulus, defending sensitivity, beauty and critical thinking is a form of serene resistance. He borrows a question from Manly P. Hall: what could be nobler than to bring light to ignorance? And he adds that knowledge only reaches its true height when it becomes wisdom, understanding and a more lucid life.

Next month we set sail for Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa. Cavafy would remind us that the voyage matters more than the arrival. The same is true of this question. We will not settle what education is for once intelligence is no longer scarce. But we can keep asking it well, in good company, one classroom at a time.

The Simulator Is Only the Beginning: Inside the CHIRON Network

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Port Virtual Lab — CHIRON

A simulator can put students inside a real cargo insurance claim. What happens after that click is what turns it into a lesson — and that’s what a network of Port Virtual Lab teachers is now comparing notes on.

Written by: Mar Monzó, CHIRON Network of PVL

Each month, the Escola’s Port Virtual Team runs a webinar for the community of teachers using Port Virtual Lab (PVL) in their own classrooms — a loose, informal network known as CHIRON. This month’s session, led by Mar Monzo, took on one PVL scenario in particular: TT Circle. While preparing it, Mar found her attention shifting — less toward how the tool works, more toward what a teacher can actually build around it once the simulation ends. What follows is a first look at where that thinking led.

The simulator is only the beginning

TT Circle takes students through almost the entire cargo insurance process: analysing the risk of an operation, requesting a quotation, seeing how a decision changes the premium, activating the policy and, when something goes wrong, documenting the damage and submitting a claim. For the teachers running it, the interesting part starts exactly there. The goal was never for students to use the simulator correctly or complete each stage in the right order — the simulation just gives them a situation close to professional reality. What a teacher builds around that experience is what turns it into learning.

What is TT Circle?

TT Circle is a cargo insurance scenario inside Port Virtual Lab. It doesn’t run in isolation — it’s one situation among the operations a class may already be working on, so a teacher can connect insurance, transport, Incoterms, documentation and incident management inside a single professional case rather than teaching each one separately.

While preparing the activity, the team kept returning to the same sequence of questions: why did you choose that level of cover, what would happen if the route changed, is the higher premium worth paying, which decision would you make again and which one would you change now that you’ve seen the result. Written up on their own, those five steps became what the network is now calling the CHIRON loop — a sequence that works with any PVL scenario, not only with insurance.

The CHIRON loop

Five steps for turning a Port Virtual Lab simulation into learning. Works with any PVL scenario; the sequence stays fixed, only the questions change.

1. Analyse — students read the operation before touching the platform: cargo, route, parties, value, known risks. No decisions yet; the teacher’s job is to set the problem and withhold the tool.

2. Decide — students commit to a decision in writing, with their reasoning in a line or two. It’s the step most often skipped, and the one that makes the rest of the loop work.

3. Simulate — they run the decision through the scenario and observe the consequence: premium, cover, claim outcome, cost of the incident. The teacher stays out of it — answering here removes the last two steps entirely.

4. Justify — students explain the decision to other groups: on what basis it was taken, what information was missing at the time.

5. Reflect — they say which decision they’d take again, which one changed once they saw the result, and what they’d need to know before deciding in a real operation. It’s the step the timetable eats first, so protecting the time for it matters most.

Different classrooms, different answers

There’s no single correct way to run it. Within the network, one teacher uses TT Circle as a case study, another as a team challenge between groups, another folds it into a longer PVL operation already underway. A comparative variant has also emerged: assign the same operation to every group, but vary one parameter each — route, cargo value, Incoterm, level of cover. The groups don’t converge on one answer; they map how the decision changes as the conditions change, which tends to produce a better discussion than everyone arriving at the same result.

The loop has its failure points too, and the network has been direct about naming them. If the decision in step two isn’t recorded, the reflection in step five turns into an opinion with nothing to test it against. If the teacher answers during step three, steps four and five disappear on their own. And the loop doesn’t survive being compressed into the last ten minutes of a session — it needs one PVL scenario, groups of three to five, and time reserved for justifying and reflecting before the class ends.

The simulator gives us the professional context. We build the learning around it.

Constantly learning

That’s really the shape CHIRON keeps taking — less a fixed method than an ongoing exchange between people teaching the same platform differently. Anyone using Port Virtual Lab is welcome to add to it: what you ran, what worked, what you’d change next time, sent to [email protected]. A short template keeps contributions easy to compare (scenario used, group, timing, the problem set, the decision asked of students, what was compared, what was adapted and why, materials attached), though a short paragraph is often just as useful as a full lesson plan. Contributions go back out to the network in the next set of notes, with the contributor’s name and institution unless they’d rather not.

CHIRON is the network of educators teaching with Port Virtual Lab, run by Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport.

An open door

CHIRON doesn’t really have a front desk — teachers tend to find their way in simply by using Port Virtual Lab and following the conversation from there. For anyone who’d like a more structured way in, the Escola happens to be running an online Training of Trainers course this October.

Upcoming: PVL Training of Trainers

261005PVL — Training of Trainers | Online | English

Dates: 5–8 October 2026

Schedule: 15:30–19:30 CEST (Spain)

Calendar and information

Programme

Registration

A 100% registration discount is available for educators — get in touch to check your eligibility.

Four Ports, One Voyage: The Escola’s 20th Anniversary Itinerary

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Sailing Ahead — 20th Anniversary

Four ports, five days, and a garden left behind in two of them: here’s what’s actually happening this October.

Between 14 and 19 October 2026, the Escola community will sail from Barcelona to Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa — the four ports whose 2006 partnership founded the school — for a week of ceremonies, an onboard course titled “Education beyond Intelligence”, and public celebrations at each stop, all followed live on social media under #Escola20Y.

The itinerary

The celebration opens in Barcelona on 14 October, at the Escola’s own headquarters in the port: a 20th anniversary presentation, an awards ceremony and the inauguration of the Jardins de l’Areté, followed by a press conference and the opening of the anniversary course, ahead of the ship’s departure that evening for Civitavecchia.

From there, the voyage continues to Civitavecchia on 16 October, Palermo on 17 October and Genoa on 19 October, each port hosting its own celebration together with the local Port Authority — an institutional ceremony, cultural moments, and networking between port administrations, sector companies, training centres and public institutions. Across the four stops, close to 700 people from around the Mediterranean are expected to take part.

Did you know?

Between ports, participants in the Escola’s celebratory course will take five thematic modules — on leadership, presence, listening, ethics and lifelong learning — led by Eduard Rodés, Marta Miquel, Jordi Pérez, Ramon Andreu, María José Codina Felip and Fran Arrébola Concejero, closing in Genoa with course reflections and certificate delivery.

A garden left behind in iron and stone

Alongside the voyage, the anniversary leaves something permanent at each founding port: the Jardins de l’Areté, an open space for encounter, dialogue and reflection, named for the Greek concept of areté — virtue, excellence, fulfilment. The first two gardens, in Barcelona and Civitavecchia, will be inaugurated on 14 and 16 October, each holding a sculpture made for the Escola by José Luis Pascual: laser-cut iron, shaped and hand-finished through ferroflexia, set on a wooden pedestal. A rising sun of six stars — one for each of the Escola’s founding values, and standing for the countries of its alumni — crowns a figure of Isis, goddess of wisdom, watching over a Mediterranean rendered in the metal below.

The two sculptures share a detail that isn’t visible to the eye but is built into how they were made: they face one another across 800 kilometres of open sea, Barcelona looking toward Civitavecchia and Civitavecchia looking back — a quiet nod to the bond between the two ports that hosted the Escola’s very first courses in 2004. Palermo and Genoa will mark their own version of the same legacy, each naming a site of its own where a statue in the same spirit will be unveiled during the anniversary events on 17 and 19 October.

Recognizing those who built it

Alongside the gardens, the Escola is presenting Areté institutional recognitions to the port authorities, collaborator companies, training centres and universities that have shaped its journey, and individual recognitions to the teachers, alumni and collaborators who have left their mark on its history — with ceremonies distributed across all four ports.


Journalists are invited to the institutional events at each stop, and selected media will travel with the Escola for the full voyage — part of a year-long communication campaign that will follow the anniversary under #Escola20Y. For everyone else, the best seat is on our socials: follow along as the Escola sails the route it started on, twenty years later.

A New Name at Our Doorstep: Jardins de l’Areté

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Escola Europea — News

The stretch of Port Vell right outside our offices now has an official name — and it’s one of our own values.

The stretch of Port Vell right outside our offices — between the Moll de Barcelona and the Moll de les Drassanes — now has an official name: Jardins de l’Areté.

Barcelona’s city council has approved the new designation, borrowing the same word that anchors the Escola’s 20th-anniversary values and the six stars in its anniversary logo. It’s already the Escola’s own postal address: Jardins de l’Areté, 1.

What’s in the name?

Areté (ἀρετή) is the ancient Greek idea of excellence — not a trait you’re born with, but one you build through practice, choice by choice. It’s the same idea behind the six stars in the Escola’s anniversary logo: imagination, dialogue, self-determination, effort, trust and wisdom. Six practices, not six virtues to admire from a distance.

The naming will get its official unveiling when the Escola kicks off its 20th-anniversary celebrations on October 14, 2026 alongside the installation of the anniversary sculpture on the pedestal already in place in the gardens, with a ground plaque reading “Sapientia” marking the spot.

From this October, one of the Escola’s own values has a permanent address in the heart of the Port of Barcelona — a few steps from where it all began twenty years ago.

Visit - Energy Transition course

800,000 Seafarers Short: The Workforce Question Behind Shipping’s Net-Zero Bet

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Sailing Ahead — Research

Shipping is placing one of the biggest regulatory bets in its history. Almost nobody is talking about who’s actually going to run the ships once it lands.

Written by Lidia Slawinska, Communications Manager – Escola Europea Intermodal Transport

In April 2025, the International Maritime Organization approved the first global framework requiring the shipping industry to cut its greenhouse gas emissions on a legally binding timeline — a Net-Zero Framework covering every oceangoing ship over 5,000 gross tonnage. Ships will have to report their fuel emissions intensity annually, meet progressively stricter limits, and either adopt cleaner fuels or pay into a compliance fund that finances the transition industry-wide. Formal adoption, originally expected in October 2025, has since been pushed into 2026, but the direction isn’t in question: the industry is decarbonizing, on a clock it doesn’t fully control.

What the framework’s supporters rarely dwell on is who’s going to crew this transition.

That’s not a hypothetical for some future decade, either. The industry’s own 2026 Seafarer Workforce Report, published by BIMCO and the International Chamber of Shipping in June, puts the current global seafarer workforce at 2.57 million people crewing 85,148 merchant ships — and finds it’s already short by 39,100 STCW-certified officers this year. Demand for officers has climbed 23.1% since 2021, for ratings 46.3%. Left unaddressed, the same report projects the industry will need 113,735 additional officers by 2030, just to keep the existing fleet running — before a single net-zero fuel enters the equation.

Research commissioned for the Maritime Just Transition Task Force estimates that

roughly 800,000 seafarers will need additional training by the mid-2030s to safely operate vessels running on zero or near-zero emission fuels.

That’s not a rounding error, on a workforce that’s already stretched thin. It’s a training and hiring problem roughly the size of a mid-sized country’s active military, layered on top of a shortage the industry hasn’t solved yet.

Not just new fuels — new skills

The gap isn’t just about learning to handle ammonia or methanol instead of heavy fuel oil, either. A 2026 academic study mapping “twin transition” skills — green and digital competencies together — across maritime firms in Bulgaria, Cyprus and Greece found that 83% of the skills most in demand for the industry’s highest-priority roles combine environmental knowledge with technical or digital ones: reading emissions data, managing automated systems, understanding regulatory standards well enough to keep a ship compliant, not just afloat.

Roughly a third of in-demand skills were purely environmental, another quarter purely digital, and the rest — the hardest roles to hire for — required both at once. Employers in the study reported persistent difficulty recruiting for exactly these blended positions, at every level from engineering officers with master’s degrees to vocationally trained technical crew.

Did you know?

The Maritime Just Transition Task Force was established at COP26 in 2021 by shipowners, seafarer unions and the IMO together — built on the principle that decarbonization should leave “no one behind.”

The fleet is already changing

The pressure isn’t waiting for the mid-2030s to arrive. DNV’s newbuild data shows alternative-fuel vessels accounted for 38% of the gross tonnage ordered in 2025 — 188 LNG-fuelled ships alone made up 31% of that, alongside 61 methanol orders (down from 149 the year before) and only limited uptake so far for ammonia and LPG. Compare that to the ships already on the water: as of August 2025, DNV counted 1,794 alternative-fuel-capable vessels in operation, against a global fleet of over 85,000 merchant ships — roughly 2%. Every new vessel ordered today needs a crew that can run it safely well before its keel is even laid, which means the training has to arrive faster than the ships do, not after them.

Regulators are racing the same clock

To their credit, regulators and unions both seem to know the clock is the problem. The IMO is revising the STCW — the international treaty setting minimum seafarer training standards — with input from shipowners and the International Transport Workers’ Federation, whose General Secretary Stephen Cotton has framed the moment as an opportunity rather than a threat:

“Seafarers are ready to lead, they are ready to shape the training frameworks for the zero carbon fuels of the future.”

A baseline training framework was slated for completion by mid-2025, with pilot testing beginning in Asia ahead of wider rollout. Whether “no one is left behind” turns out to be true will depend less on the regulation itself than on how fast training capacity can actually scale to meet it.

Training is starting to catch up

Some of the response is already visible. The IMO’s GreenVoyage2050 programme, working with GIZ’s International Power-to-X Hub, launched a Training-of-Trainers programme in July 2025 to build local capacity for teaching alternative-fuel safety in developing countries. Alongside it, the Global Industry Alliance to Support Low Carbon Shipping has built an Alternative Fuels Learning Portal for seafarers, harbour masters, shore staff and policymakers — its methanol module went live at the end of 2025, with ammonia and hydrogen modules due through 2026. Classification societies are moving in parallel: DNV runs its own Maritime Academy with dedicated alternative-fuels coursework for the surveyors and crew who’ll certify and operate these ships. None of it closes a six-figure gap by itself. But it’s a reasonable sketch of what closing it will actually take: coordinated, sustained, and running years ahead of the regulation’s own deadlines.

A logistics problem, in the most literal sense

It’s a useful reminder, for anyone in the business of training people for ports and ships, that the hardest problems in a transition like this one aren’t only technical. They’re logistical, in the most literal sense: getting the right training to the right people before a deadline that’s already been set — and, increasingly, before a shortage that’s already here.

Escola Europea Offices in Barcelona - 2026

Sailing Ahead: Twenty Years In, Still Setting Course

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Sailing Ahead — 20th Anniversary

Twenty years ago, the Escola began as a way to convince road hauliers to trust a ship — and the only argument that ever worked was putting them on deck. This October, that same instinct takes us back to sea, retracing the ports that founded us.

By Eduard Rodés, Director, Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport

Written by: Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea

Twenty years ago the Escola began as a conversation between people who trusted one another: the Ports of Barcelona, Rome (Civitavecchia) and Genoa, together with Grimaldi Lines and Grandi Navi Veloci. It is worth being honest about what we were trying to do. The first courses were not conceived as education at all; they were a way of promoting a service. We were convinced that short sea shipping worked, and the people we most needed to convince were road hauliers — operators whose entire working life was built around not using a ship.

You cannot argue somebody out of that with a presentation. What you can do is take them to the quay, put them on board and let them watch the operation happen around them.

That turned out to be a better idea than the one we had. Almost immediately, what we had designed for professionals already in the sector was reinterpreted for everyone arriving in it, and for those who simply wanted to bring their knowledge up to date. The commercial argument had become a method. In those first years we spent a great deal of time explaining why a classroom should sometimes be a ship. We no longer have to explain it. More than 25,000 participants have done that for us.

This October we mark the anniversary the way we began it: on the water. We will board ships in Barcelona and sail, in person, to Civitavecchia, Palermo and Genoa — the very ports that founded us. So when we say we are Sailing Ahead, it is not a metaphor. It is the itinerary.

Eduard Rodés speaking on board a ferry during an early Escola course

Did you know?

Palermo joined the founding group shortly after the Escola was established in 2006, completing the circle of ports that we will sail back to this October.

What people actually remember

If you ask anyone who has taken one of our courses what they remember, they seldom begin with the content. They begin with a person. Some of our trainers come from universities and some spend the rest of the week in a terminal, a shipping line or a customs office, and I have never been able to predict which of them a group will remember. We mix our groups as far as we are able — nationalities, companies, sometimes direct competitors — and people who arrive as strangers leave having shared a classroom, a quayside and a dinner table. We put a great deal of care into designing modules. What participants carry home is one another.

That is why we have always been willing to put people somewhere they did not expect: a theatre exercise, a piece of music, a simulation running inside a platform that exists nowhere else. The formats are not the point. They are what it takes to get a room full of professionals to stop performing their job titles for long enough to meet each other. It is the same discovery we made in the first year, applied to new material.

What the pandemic forced us to learn

None of it was really tested until it had to be. In our second decade the pandemic removed almost everything our model depended on: immersion, direct contact with ports and vessels, the experiential learning that had defined us from the beginning. For a while we had to hold on to our structure without being able to practise our essence. It forced a reinvention we had not planned, and with the European Union’s support through the YEP MED project it is where much of what we now call phygital actually began — not as a trend we adopted, but as a constraint we had to build our way through.

Port Virtual Lab lets trainees run simulated companies inside a digital environment built to mirror real port operations. PLIKA connects a knowledge network across the Mediterranean. This year we introduced AI training for port-logistics communities, because ignoring the tool was not an option and neither was letting it replace what matters: judgement, presence and human connection. That is the thinking behind Education Beyond Intelligence, our anniversary training programme — modules on theatre, on music, on ethics, built on the conviction that technology should sharpen a person’s discernment rather than stand in for it.

Education, like music

I have come to think of education the way I think of music: both ephemeral and lasting. Every course ends. Every group goes home. And yet something stays — a way of understanding intermodality, a sensitivity to sustainability, the habit of asking not only whether something works but whether it should.

The six stars in our anniversary logo — imagination, dialogue, self-determination, effort, trust, wisdom — were chosen to describe the people who built this place. They borrow from Areté, and we have never been much interested in defining virtue in the abstract. It is easier to point at it. As of this autumn, our address in Barcelona is Jardins de l’Areté, 1. Twenty years of work, and the word ends up on the post. There are worse ways to be reminded of what you said you stood for.

The screen can simulate, and the platform can connect a community across four countries before breakfast.

The theatre, the music, the ship and the people in the room are a different matter.

Next month we sail to the ports that made us, and I suspect the conversations on board will be the same ones we have been having since 2006: what should we teach, and how. We began by asking road hauliers to trust a ship, and the only argument that ever worked was letting them stand on the deck. Twenty years later the answer is still not technological. The next twenty will belong to whoever keeps asking, course by course, which parts of learning have to stay in the room.

Two Countries, One Simulator: A Port Virtual Lab Case Study

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Port virtual Lab — Case Study

Two institutes, one simulator, no need for everyone to be in the same room at the same time.

Last April, 29 people sat down for a five-week course built around the Escola’s own simulation platform, Port Virtual Lab (PVL) — 26 students and 3 teachers, split between ITS Aerospazio Piemonte, a vocational institute in Italy, and PRAT FP, a training centre in Barcelona. Some of them never left home for most of it. All of them ended up running the same virtual port community together.

The course, “Intermodal and Green Transport,” was built in three stages. Three online sessions in early April introduced the PVL platform and the fundamentals of international trade. Five in-person days in Barcelona followed, centred on supervised PVL teamwork, a maritime visit to the Port of Barcelona, and stops at the Morrot railway terminal, Logistainer and the Port Nou container terminal. Two closing online sessions in May covered airfreight operations. Twenty-five hours of training in total, entirely in English.

What is Port Virtual Lab?

PVL is the Escola’s own simulation environment for port and logistics operations. Participants take on roles inside virtual shipping lines, freight forwarders, terminals and customs brokers, and run real trade documentation and ERP processes through a simulated — but realistic — port community. It’s what let two institutes in two different countries train as one group without everyone needing to be in the same room.

Inside the simulation

Throughout the course, participants operated inside simulated companies built into PVL — SDG Lines, SDG Airlines, Port Railway, MedTrade, PlayForwarding Logistics, PlayCustoms and others — handling the kind of work a real port community runs on every day: export and import maritime operations, electronic documentation, ERP management through Click&Cargo, tariff classification, and airfreight bookings. It’s hands-on work — teams negotiated commercial offers, processed shipments end to end, and presented their results to the group, all inside the platform.

Students practicing with PVL during the simulation part of the training programme

The blend of formats did the work that travel usually does in a course like this. The online sessions carried the groundwork — platform training, trade concepts, documentation — while the five days in Barcelona were reserved for what only works in person: the supervised teamwork, the port visits, the closing presentations. Students from two countries and two institutes ended the course having built and run the same simulated operations together.

Did you know?

Participants rated the course 4.3 out of 5 overall, with the highest marks going to interaction with trainers and support (4.66) and to the maritime visit to the Port of Barcelona (4.64). More than one participant asked for more time on the PVL platform itself — a good problem for a simulator to have.

What comes after a course like this

The course was booked and delivered as a standard PVL training — invoiced to each institute individually, no EU funding involved. But it left ITS Piemonte’s own contact asking the Escola’s Italy team a bigger question: could a course like this be run as a proper Erasmus+ programme instead, with more institutes and EU funding behind it?

The Escola’s Italy team is now exploring exactly that, under the Erasmus+ Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) format — built for precisely this shape of course: a short physical mobility period combined with a compulsory virtual component, run jointly by institutions from several different countries. The idea takes the same format the April course used, and widens it: more partner institutes, more countries, and EU funding behind the training instead of a course booked one institute at a time.

Escola Europea presents Port Virtual Lab at the NEXUS International Conference

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Digitalisation & Smart Ports

We took PVL.ONE to NEXUS DGTMP 2026 in Sines and Setúbal

Last week, we joined ports, universities and logistics experts in Sines and Setúbal to talk about digital transformation and the green transition of maritime ports — and to show how immersive simulation is shaping the skills of tomorrow.

22–25 June 2026
Sines & Setúbal, Portugal

We took PVL.ONE on the road. From 22 to 25 June, we joined the NEXUS International Conference – DGTMP 2026 (Digital and Green Transition in Maritime Ports: Trends and Challenges), held in Sines and Setúbal, Portugal, as part of the NEXUS Agenda, a project funded by Portugal’s PRR to drive innovation in transport, logistics and mobility.

The conference brought together universities, port authorities, companies and international experts to discuss one of the sector’s defining challenges: how ports can become both more digital and more sustainable, without leaving people and skills behind.

What we’re presenting

PVL.ONE: simulation as a training ground

We presented PVL.ONE (Port Virtual Lab) and the work we’re doing in immersive learning, simulation and the digitalisation of logistics and port operations. PVL.ONE recreates a port community in a virtual environment, giving learners a space to practise real operational decisions before they ever set foot on a quay.

For us, this is about more than technology. Digital twins and simulation tools only matter if they help people build the skills the ports of the future will actually need — and that was very much the conversation we had in Sines and Setúbal.

Orlando Reveco presenting the Port Virtual Lab platform during the NEXUS Conference

“Digital transformation in logistics is not just about adopting new technologies—it’s about preparing people to use them effectively. With Port Virtual Lab, we create realistic learning environments where participants can develop the practical skills, confidence and collaborative mindset needed to operate in the ports of the future.”

— Orlando Reveco, Digital Product Manager, Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport

About the conference

NEXUS DGTMP 2026

DGTMP 2026 is part of the broader NEXUS Agenda, bringing together academic, institutional and industry voices to explore the digital and green transition of maritime ports. It was exactly the kind of space we like to be in: where innovation, training and real port operations meet.

Event details

22–25 June 2026  ·  Sines & Setúbal, Portugal  ·  Full programme: dgtmp2026.ips.pt

Thank you to everyone who stopped by to see PVL.ONE in action and talk ports, digitalisation and the future of maritime training with us.

Escola Europea explores cooperation with Ibn Zohr University to strengthen logistics education in Morocco

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The Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport continues to strengthen its collaboration with higher education institutions across the Mediterranean. During a recent visit to Agadir, representatives of the Escola met with Ibn Zohr University (Université Ibn Zohr – UIZ) to explore opportunities for cooperation in transport, logistics and international trade education.

The meeting provided an opportunity for both institutions to present their educational activities, exchange experiences, and discuss how closer collaboration could contribute to developing the next generation of logistics professionals in Morocco.

Founded in 1989, Ibn Zohr University is one of Morocco’s largest public universities, serving five regions in the south of the country—Souss-Massa, Guelmim-Oued Noun, Laâyoune-Sakia El Hamra, Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab and Drâa-Tafilalet. Through campuses in Agadir, Aït Melloul, Ouarzazate, Taroudant, Laâyoune, Guelmim, Smara and Dakhla, the university plays a key role in higher education and regional development.

The meeting was attended by Hossine El Ihssini, Deputy Director in charge of Pedagogical Affairs, and Fouad Achemchem, Deputy Director for Cooperation, who welcomed Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport.

From left to right: Fouad Achemchem, Deputy Director for Cooperation; Eduard Rodés, Director of the Escola Europea – Intermodal Transport; and Hossine El Ihssini, Deputy Director in charge of Pedagogical Affairs at Ibn Zohr University, during the meeting held in Agadir to explore future cooperation in logistics and transport education.

During the discussions, the Escola presented its practical approach to logistics education, its international training activities, and its digital learning initiatives, including the Port Virtual Lab (PVL)—the online simulation platform that allows students and professionals to experience international transport operations through realistic, collaborative scenarios.

One of the key topics explored was the potential integration of Ibn Zohr University into the Port Virtual Lab network. Such cooperation would enable students to participate in simulation-based learning activities alongside participants from other universities and professional training programmes, strengthening both their technical knowledge and their international collaboration skills.

Beyond student participation, both institutions also discussed opportunities to involve other organisations from the Agadir region, creating stronger links between academia, industry and the local logistics ecosystem. This collaborative approach reflects a shared commitment to preparing professionals capable of responding to the rapidly evolving challenges facing transport, ports and international supply chains.

The meeting marks an important first step towards building a long-term partnership between the Escola Europea and Ibn Zohr University, further reinforcing the Escola’s mission of promoting practical, international and collaborative education throughout the Mediterranean region.