This paper investigates the usability of educational metadata schemas with respect to the case of the MALTED (Multimedia Authoring Language Teachers and Educational Developers) project at University College London (UCL). The project aims to facilitate authoring of multimedia materials for language learning by allowing teachers to share multimedia materials for language teaching, and offering a comparatively easy interface for retrieving materials and composing exercises and courses from them. Although a brief description of the MALTED system is given, the paper focuses on usability problems encountered by the project during the development of the MALTED system. The work finds that there are serious incompatibilities between the current educational metadata schema, as promoted by the Learning Object Metadata (LOM) working group of the IEEE Learning Technologies Standardization Committee, and the way language teachers actually go about authoring teaching materials. (Author)