Lifelong learning implementations in virtual communities: formal and informal approaches and their impact on learners

The work presents our experience as designers, developers and administrators of an e-Learning system (LMS) used by the Faculty of Economics of the University of Trento. The system started its work in the late 90s and was then rewritten under the increasing need of the users to promote new more collaboration-oriented forms of teaching / learning, compared to traditional ones. Currently we are managing the evolution of the system in the direction to provide a better support for cooperative activities among users. In the work we will describe the evolution of this system, showing why the cooperation in an educational environment requires coherent architectural choices.