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The outbreak of the coronavirus (SARs-CoV-2) in the world forced around 130 countries to temporarily close their educational facilities to avoid the spread of the virus. Several schools, colleges, universities, and institutes shifted to online learning to maintain continuity in delivering education (Hong, Lee, and Ye 2021). Education delivery has taken a completely new shape after the global pandemic of COVID-19. This has occurred mostly due to the restrictions related to the lockdown and the social distancing norms, forcing the educational institutions to opt for online platforms for lecture delivery. However, the online mode of lecture delivery existed a decade ago, but the online mode was having very few takers from both the teachers and the student’s community. Online mode was widely available in the form of MOOC’s (Massive Open Online Courses) which was majorly in the asynchronous mode and was popular as a mode to gain additional certificates or knowledge in the topics which require repetitions to register the concepts. Additionally, the motivation behind opting for MOOC’s includes future economic benefits, development of professional identity, achievement, and fun (Nagasampige and Nagasampige 2017). However, due to the covid-19, online education has become an integral part of the education delivery allowing to overcome the temporal and spatial challenges (Panigrahi, Srivastava, and Sharma 2018). Moreover, as per the estimates around 10 million academic hours were compromised due to the Covid-19 (Dutta 2020). The advisory committee of the University Grant Commission of India has instructed the members of education facilities to utilize various open-access tools which are already in use to deliver education to students of remote areas. Live lectures were given by several institutes and universities using Google meeting, zoom, EasyClass, etc. Many schools and colleges opted for YouTube by uploading recorded lectures as students can learn anytime. Due to the high-speed mobile networks, online mode became a reality, and several advantages and success stories are associated with the process (Dutta 2020). The online mode of education is not a new concept. A major increase in the online mode of education is seen in the past few years (Allen et al. 2016) especially in post graduate education.
The provision of online classes has ensured the continuity of education in the difficult times of pandemic; the provision of online classes is widely admired by the student’s community at the same time it has pushed the teachers to adapt to the requirements and learn the technical skills to deliver an effective lecture, which can be evaluated by attainment of the learning outcomes. Students being the receiver, are the ones who are greatly exposed to the risk of the sub-standard lecture delivery and could get affected by that, the instance of a school going girl student committing suicide (R. and M. 2020) due to unavailability of the smartphone to attend the online classes, leading to the fear of lower academic performance substantiate the importance of the inquiry about the perception of the students towards the online mode of education delivery. The effectiveness of online education can get affected by the variables such as culture and language (Liu et al. 2010), Course Stream (Forde and Gallagher 2020), usage of online tools by the teachers (Mohammed et al. 2020) and the individual characteristics of the students (Ghazali et al. 2020). This study investigates the individual characteristics of the postgraduate management students based on their physical exercise and nutrition behaviour on the perceived attainment of the learning goals and satisfaction from the online mode of education. To the best of the knowledge of the authors, this is the first time the relationship between exercise and nutrition behaviour on the perceived attainment of learning goals and the online education efficacy is investigated. This study establishes the moderating role of self-learning hours on the relationship between exercise behaviour and the perceived attainment of learning goals.