The author discusses their experiences teaching an upper-division seminar course in a traditional face-to-face setting, and re-designing a "long eighteenth century" survey course for delivery online. The article thus explores spatial strategies in both face-to-face and online courses, and suggests ways in which they can be particularly exploited in the case of Britain's long eighteenth century. But on a wider level, it is offered as a reflection and critique upon course design and, specifically, on how online technologies can be used to re-think the historical conceptualization of space. The crucial thing the author has learned is that online learning technologies enable a re-thinking of many of the communicative patterns and practices which, in face-to-face courses, we simply take for granted. In the case of this course on eighteenth-century Britain, that awareness turned out to be exploitable in the direction of the course content. It enabled an existing content focus on reading spaces to be further developed in an experiential manner. Online learning makes you aware of boundaries and borders that you didn't always grasp - and an awareness of that can be usefully exploited in future course design.