Co-op’s are either January-June or July-December typically. It sounds like the students you know chose the 5 year 3 co-op route which I do think is the most common among those I know personally, so that makes sense as well.
I’m not aware of any such “fully year” courses. Northeastern operates on 4 four credit classes a semester (plus labs etc) so that might help, and I think otherwise it would just be split up into two courses you can do whenever it makes sense for your schedule.
The only thing similar to this I know of is the engineering capstone projects which are either done senior year in consecutive semesters or simply broken up midway by a co-op I believe.