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With the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has shifted from traditional classroom teaching to digital platforms and ‘screen-based' education. The use of e-labs for practical component has raised multiple questions about the effectiveness in bringing precise learning outcomes. The present work comprehends the experience of more than 500 undergraduate science students at the University of Delhi about the use of virtual labs and analyzes their inclination towards the online education system as compared to the physical mode system in reference to practical work. The input from students has been gauged via an online questionnaire. A majority (65%) of survey respondents show their preference for the physical mode of practical education than the virtual mode. It is concluded that the blended mode of teaching and learning promises to benefit students more, rather than shifting the education system entirely to an online mode.

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The laboratory work holds a great importance for an undergraduate student of science. And during COVID -19 pandemic, when the theory classes were moved online, migrating practical classes to online mode turned out to be a challenging task. This article aims to study the use of mathematical programs as an extensive methodological approach to enhance the learning of electronic circuit designing at undergraduate level. The students were given a task of designing a well-known oscillator circuit using a mathematical program written in open source application Scilab. The values of all the components needed to design an oscillator were calculated. The circuit was then designed practically for various frequencies using the theoretically obtained component values. The obtained output frequency of oscillator circuit was within 5% variation to the theoretically obtained one. In this article, the authors captured the experience of 500 undergraduate science students studying at various colleges of University of Delhi, India via a valid online questionnaire circulated through different platforms. The response of the students was gauged and it could be inferred that mathematical programs are working as a decent replacement during these demanding times and can be used as an add-on, once the physical labs start operating back to normalcy.

This paper analyses the current progression of the coronavirus pandemic, with the help of a mathematical model based on differential equations. The model has been inspired by the standard SIR (Susceptible-Infected-Recovered) model in epidemiology. The model takes the effect of co-morbidities and vaccination into account. The susceptible population is split into healthy and co-morbid sub-compartments. A series of graphs is presented for the visual depiction of the situation at hand in the Indian context. Finally, a survey (carried out through an online questionnaire) based analysis of the perception of vaccination in the masses in general, and the medical community in particular, has also been presented.