Our Mission

At Merspi, we believe that:

• All education, wherever possible, should be free and easily available
• The best way to learn and study for your subjects is to teach it to someone else
• A concern shared is a concern halved

Merspi is about making learning accessible and enjoyable – and we urge you to share Merspi with your classmates, teachers, friends and family.

Merspi is a Web 2.0 question and answer site for the VCE community that's free. Free to ask questions, free to answer questions and free to read. You can register if you want to collect karma and win valuable flair that will appear next to your name, but otherwise, it's just free. And easy to use.

We don't run Merspi. You do. Merspi is collaboratively built and maintained by your fellow VCE students, tutors, teachers and parents. Once the system learns to trust you, you'll be able to edit anything, much like Wikipedia. With your help, we can build good answers to every imaginable VCE question together. No matter what subject you study, social learning across all fields is our goal.

We believe that finding the right answer to your VCE questions should never be more than a Google search away. Merspi is easy to find and easy to use. And as frictionless and painless to use as we could make it – maybe even fun.

What's so special about Merspi?

Well, nothing really. We're just a synthesis of a variety of effective websites that have used different approaches to deliver and transfer knowledge. At Merspi, we have been inspired by the following technologies:

• Wikipedia, for their collaborative knowledge archive
• Digg, for their innovative method of socially organising great and relevant content
• Blackboard and other systems of educational content management, used in most of the leading universities around the world
• Online bulletin boards and forums, for their ability to create and maintain social networks

Merspi borrows the relevant features from all these concepts, and brings them together to facilitate the best learning and understanding of VCE content possible. We are a knowledge base like Wikipedia, a socially organised website like Digg, with a strong emphasis on specific learning objectives like Blackboard, whilst fostering a strong VCE community in a forum-style environment.

And to try it out, you don't even need to register! You can try it out now! Just ask a question.

Who runs Merspi?

You do. Anyone who has ever left a question, answer or comment with Merspi is a team member! Are you ready to join the team?

Our moderators are 100% elected by the community, through their reputation with Merspi. As users gain karma, they will be given more trust to manage the community's contributions.

Outside of Merspi.com.au, our fan-base actively promotes the website through a variety of means – online social media (Facebook and Twitter), flyers and word of mouth. There's something about Merspi. And people want to share it.

You'll see what we mean when you experience it for yourself. Welcome to the team.

Who started it?

“One of the first things I noticed when I began my study at university was that there was a far better educational platform for resources and information compared to my high school. As a recent VCE graduate, I thought, why? Then, when I took an entrepreneurship elective in my course, I became motivated to make positive change in the world. "Let's create it!" – and so it finally began.” — James Spittal, Founder of Merspi

Merspi began in October 2009 as a two man project with one united purpose: to change education in Australia for the better. Today, Merspi is headed by a team of talented directors and a handful of trusted and reputable moderators (from students to teachers to members of authorities such as VTAC). We are now the proud provider of a new platform for learning on the internet – social learning for the VCE community.

Here's some of the faces behind Merspi today:

Click their faces to meet a team of talented students, teachers, tutors, academics and entrepreneurs.

I'm fascinated! How can I learn more?

Check out the Merspi FAQ. Or, if you want to speak with a real person, send an email to hello@merspi.com.au.