This article highlights the growing centrality of non-formal and informal training to acquire the skills and abilities required in the XXI century socioeconomic and in this context explores the role played by cultural and symbolic experiences in informal learning processes, to stand out the relevance of the ecology of learning as a complex system that relates the different levels of education. Two very specific cases are then analyzed as an illustration of these relationships and complementarities of the training plans. The first case is that of AMURE, where nonformal education is used to solve a problem of the formal education system such as school dropout. In the second case, MAGACIM tv is described as a proposal for non-formal education, based on audiovisual production capabilities that activates a complex process of informal learning not foreseen. Both cases serve to propose as a topic of debate that, if we want to understand the educational process, we have to focus on the ecologies of learning and if what we want is to increase the transformative effects of learning then we have to increase the amount and intensity of cultural and communicative experiences and insert them into informal learning processes.