And they are not "engineering students", but "student engineers".

Treating them as if they are hired additions to a company is an important distinction, according to the inaugural course director and professor of engineering Jim Morgan.

"Even now, when unis admit students, they don't necessarily have expectations that they will all graduate," he said. 

"But I think that no company hires people expecting them to fail some day."

His own experience with the "fairly brutal" traditional model of engineering education in his native United States has helped shape Professor Morgan's philosophy for a better way of educating the engineers of the future.

And the opportunity to set up a completely new engineering school was too good to pass up when he received a phone call from an Australian friend in late 2014.

Professor Morgan has been at CSU since April last year and the first students of the inaugural course are now in their second semester.

They will spend only 18 months on campus before beginning a paid one-year work placement - the first of four (during which time they will continue to study).

They get to choose their own topics from a "topic tree", so they learn as they need the knowledge, and work on group projects inside a new state-of-the-art building on the CSU campus.

Professor Morgan said some educators he knows remain confused as to how students can be taught without lectures.

"I still have colleagues who believe that students can't learn things unless you see them in class," he said. "For them it's hard to conceive of a world without lectures."

But Professor Morgan said the CSU course, as the newest engineering course in Australia, could not simply be a "xerox" of other courses.

Besides, he said the students themselves would be the ultimate barometer of the course’s success.

"We do expect them to be CSU engineering's reputation," he said.