Abstract
Communities of Practice (CoPs) focus on several fields such as engineering, management, and teaching. They offer numerous advantages: exchanging and sharing expertise, collaboration, training and joint development of tacit and explicit knowledge. Our purpose is to extend the application of these communities to the e-learning field. The result of this extension is a new category of CoPs called CoPE (Communities of Practice of E-learning) which combines two fields, 1) CoPs as basic field, and 2) E-learning as an application domain. We define the concept of CoPE and the underlying concepts such as learning situations, actors and their roles, activities and possible types of interactions, as well as the environment composed of services, tools and resources.