I think holding "shift" while toggling the upper level of hierarchy in a collection (any of the toggles; holdout, indirect only, and so on) will take care of toggling all "children" collections inside.
I'm watching these on mobile right now so I can't quite test it, so I'm sorry if my memory fails me.
If that's right though, I still think it's good to toggle it open to double check it happened as expected. No one likes to waste render time and I can totally see myself messing up the set up.
On another note, very excited for this course! I found very tricky to find good information about render passes and proper workflows with After Effects and am looking forward to build a better foundation on these concepts and, even better, be able to do it all without leaving Blender!
Oh, excellent tip about toggling all the child collections, I'll have to test it out! Thank you!