Moodle: Glossary importing

I've been playing around with the glossary function in Moodle. It seems like each semester there are terms that have students confused that might be resolved by supplying them with a more detailed and context-driven definition than what their textbook offers. The Glossary feature of Moodle would allow me to do that potentially, and this would be a useful resource for them to refer to throughout the semester, not to mention they potentially could export these into a study tool for their mobile devices.

Entering the glossary terms is pretty straightforward, however, it is a little clunky to do it one by one. An alternative is to type out the term and definition into an excel sheet in adjacent columns. These can be imported into Moodle in a slightly tricky way as follows

• visit http://moodleflair.com/moodle/mod/resource/view.php?id=119 and download the linked html file
• open up the html file into your browser - it should look like a webpage. 
• copy and paste your two columns into the webpage's left column
• click on "convert" and you'll see the info get converted into "xml" (extensible markup language) format. The new material shows up in the right column. 
• cut and paste the converted material into a word document. Here's the tricky part - save as a text file, but give it an ".xml" suffix
• now you can import all the terms directly into the Moodle glossary

An alternative to all of this is that you can have the students help you generate it and grade them on the quality of their entries. 

I'm going to try this with the second section of Bio111 - the material that traditionally is the toughest - and see if it improves student comprehension.