Peter Murr

Peter MurrInstructional Design Founder

I build things that make expertise useful.

Peter Murr
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The Profile/No. 01
A working life in instructional design
The Profile

The quiet obsession with what makes training actually work.

Twenty years inside the rooms where professional learning gets built - and the question the industry keeps avoiding.

I'm an instructional design founder. I've spent twenty years designing professional training for organisations where the stakes are real - healthcare, social care, financial services, charities, professional bodies. Over 1000 of them. Along the way I became quietly obsessed with the question most people in this industry skip over: why does so much training exist and so little of it actually change anything?

The answer almost never lives where people look for it. It's not in the content. It's in the architecture underneath - the sequencing, the scenario placement, the assessment design, the pacing. The invisible decisions that separate a course someone completes from a course that actually shifts how they work.

“I think through building. I care about every millimetre. And I'd rather make something two per cent better than ship something twenty per cent louder.”
- Peter Murr, on practice
An open notebook on a sunlit wooden desk beside a brass lamp and reading glasses
Plate I. The desk, early morning.
The Portfolio/Two features
What I've built
I.Feature - Software

AI that generates learning, not just words.

CourseAgent - a course-creation platform built on twenty years of knowing what actually makes training work.

Most AI tools in this space generate content. Words on screens. CourseAgent generates courses - with proper instructional architecture baked in. Scenario arcs that mirror real workplace decisions. Assessment that tests application, not recall. Thirty-five different section types because a flipcard teaches differently to a timeline, and the person building the course should be choosing between them, not stuck with one template.

The details are the point. One-click translation into nineteen languages - every section type, every quiz, every piece of feedback, independently editable per language. Spaced-repetition refresher courses generated from your existing content. Live Publish, so every URL, portal and SCORM package updates the moment you hit save - no re-exporting, no versioning headaches.

You can build from a brief, from documents, from a YouTube video, from a URL. You can share a course via a tracked link without needing an LMS at all. Or export to any LMS you already have.

The AI doesn't learn instructional design from scratch each time. It draws on what we've learned building eight thousand courses for over a thousand organisations. That's the difference between AI that generates words and AI that generates learning.

courseagent.ai

II.Feature - Studio

The human craft side of the practice.

ME Learning - a bespoke course-development studio for organisations that need the full service.

A course development studio. The human craft side - bespoke course design for organisations that need the full service. Twenty years of building the expertise that CourseAgent now carries forward in code.

Both exist because they solve different problems. ME Learning builds training where you need a specialist pair of hands. CourseAgent puts that same thinking into the hands of the people closest to the knowledge.

melearning.co.uk

WHAT I'M CURRENTLY THINKING ABOUT
01

We've built a compliance training system where doing the right thing is unaffordable. The average course refresh costs five to ten thousand pounds and takes six to eight weeks. Most organisations' quarterly training budgets don't cover a single update. So courses age. Compliance risk grows. And everyone knows.

A tall stack of dusty manila folders and binders on an empty office desk in fading afternoon light
02

The most interesting shift in education isn't AI generating content. It's AI making real instructional design principles available to people who've never heard of Bloom's taxonomy but know their subject cold. The democratisation isn't about access to tools. It's about access to methodology.

A craftsman's workbench in a sunlit workshop with hand tools arranged in careful order beside an open book of diagrams
03

Personalisation in corporate training is mostly a lie. Adaptive learning paths in a twenty-minute compliance module aren't personalisation - they're a settings menu. Real personalisation starts with who's teaching, what context they're teaching in, and whether the scenarios reflect the actual workplace. That's a design problem, not a data problem.

An empty wooden chair with a folded jacket facing an open window onto a soft landscape at golden hour
The Index/Preoccupations
What I'm interested in

Seven things, currently, holding my attention.

A short, deliberately incomplete index of the questions I keep coming back to.

  1. 01

    Accessibility, designed in

    What it really means when you build for it from the start rather than bolt it on at the end.

  2. 02

    Multi-language learning

    What gets lost - and what gets found - in translation.

  3. 03

    Green skills training

    The biggest education market nobody's built for yet.

  4. 04

    The VCSE sector

    What happens when mission-driven organisations can't afford the tools that would let them scale their impact.

  5. 05

    Inevitability in design

    How to make things that feel as if they couldn't have been made any other way.

  6. 06

    Rams on the LMS

    What Dieter Rams would have to say about most learning platforms in use today.

  7. 07

    The 07:00 fairway

    The specific kind of thinking that only happens on a golf course before anyone else arrives.

Empty golf fairway at sunrise, mist hugging the grass, a lone flag in the distance