No, you take the exact amount of courses as anyone else would. You can do a 5-year program with 3 co-ops or a 4-year program with 2. Of course, you also don't have summer breaks and there is less time off between the fall and spring semesters.

I'd also like to point out that if you argue college should be about creating academics, plenty of my friends went to my school and went on to become one. They simply used their co-ops to do research, either on campus, for another university, or for a company.

This is not the case at pretty much every co-op school I know of, including my own. Usually the programs utilize summer breaks and take 5 years, though you can often do 2 co-ops in 4 years or the like.