Reusable learning objects have always been adapted in e-learning environments to serve different purposes in instructional design. This adaptation process is usually limited by varying metadata standards of reusable learning objects that in most cases do not conform to the standard structure of the learning objects for a given educational level. In this paper, we present an analysis of various learning object metadata standards and propose a new metadata structure for a higher education reusable learning object. We evaluate this new metadata structure by instantiating it with a learning object authoring tool that also supports adaptation of learning objects with multi-format assets. We use expert sampling technique to randomly select 8 experts in higher education instructional design (from three different universities) to evaluate the functionality, correctness and usability of the tool in authoring reusable learning objects with multi-format assets. This process is repeated with 10 experts in instructional design, randomly selected from 5 universities. The results from the two experiments show a strong positive correlation and this proves that the proposed metadata structure can be adopted by higher education institutions in instructional design process to create adaptable reusable learning objects.