When creating courses using the site default settings the courses stay tied to the default even if it changes. The behavior for most Course site defaults is that they apply at course creation, changes to the defaults don't update the existing courses.

We have found that setting up the course defaults to Collapsed Topics and a maximum number of section of 11 and then creating some courses works as expected; however, if you change that maximum to 20 all the courses created increase their number of sections to 20. If you lower it back down to 5, they all drop to 5. If you manually change the setting within a course and save the change this link is broken and future changes to the default do not affect the course.

This appears to happen only with Collapsed Topics (we have not tested Collapsed Weeks), but it does not affect the standard topics and weeks formats.