The paper presents a discussion on the different approaches that the authors have found in learning settings respect to ICT platforms that support the educational activities. The authors discuss three different approaches in pursuing learning activities in real educational contexts. The considered approaches are different in the sense of the metaphor used. The approaches related to LMSs follow the metaphor of "course", while in the approaches related with web 2.0 technologies (like Facebook™, Twitter™, Flickr™ etc), the founding metaphor is the individual with its social networks. Finally, the third approach has its building blocks in the idea of (virtual) community and virtual communities systems, where the core paradigm of the platform is the (virtual) community that offers specialized services for the purpose of the community to the enrolled members, and where the subject is just a participant that adheres to the rules of the community, with duties, rights, tasks to do and objectives to achieve. The authors will discuss all these three approaches, the different levels of applicability in learning settings, and specifically the potential of the virtual communities-based system that they adopted in the experimentations conducted in the last ten years.