虛擬學習社群中最重要的活動就是知識分享。知識分享能讓能讓學習者從各種不同的領域（在同一個社群中往往有各種不同專業知識的人）獲得相關的知識（內隱或外顯）。在虛擬學習社群中學習的成效是基於內隱或外顯知識在學習者間傳遞的多快，或是在虛擬社群中的數位內容有多快被產生與傳播。 我們將從兩方面探討，第一個是社會學的角度來看虛擬學習社群，並提出如何快速有效率地鼓勵學習者去互相搜尋、溝通、分享各自的內隱與外顯知識；第二個是從技術層面，我們將提出如何將P2P與即時通訊導入虛擬學習社群的環境中。 本論文的結論是希望結合P2P等技術於虛擬學習社群環境中能幫助學習者快速找到或分享他們的相關知識、檔案甚至是合作學習的對象。 An important activity in a virtual learning community is knowledge sharing. The activities of knowledge sharing will enable learners to access relevant knowledge (explicit or tacit) from broader scope of resource (e.g., people in a virtual learning community with relevant knowledge). The learning performance in such learning environment is fundamentally based on how effectively the explicit and tacit knowledge can be shared across learners, and how efficiently the created knowledge can be organized and disseminated to enrich digital content across the virtual learning community. From the social aspect of virtual learning community, we will address how to support an efficiently and effectively social interaction to encourage learners to search, communicate, and share both explicit and tacit knowledge with each other. From the technical aspect, we will address how to apply peer-to-peer and instant messenger as a collaboration support environment to augment knowledge sharing in virtual learning communities. Results of this research demonstrate that applying peer-to-peer collaboration support environment to knowledge sharing helps learners find right content and related knowledgeable collaborators who are willing to share their knowledge.
