This article describes the development of The King Years, a weekly seminar taught at the University of Baltimore (UB) by Taylor Branch, the scholar who won the Pulitzer Prize for the first volume of his trilogy on the Civil Rights era. The King Years represents a foot in the water for a campus seeking a slow yet innovative entry into the world of massive online offerings. The King Years team did not want simply to follow the established Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) model by filming a series of lectures and posting them to a web site. The team wanted broad distribution of the civil rights history, but at the same time they valued the traditional practice of the seminar, which recognizes the essential importance of in-class discussion. Even as they planned to reach an audience beyond the walls of UB, the team hoped to achieve the intimacy and in-depth exchange that only a seminar offers. The team's insistence on these two goals produced the final structure of the course: a face-to-face seminar held in a classroom studio and simultaneously available via the web in a secure online community for auditors.