Higher education institutions around the world have increasingly been concerned with staff professional development (SPD) programmes for academic and teaching (A/T) staff. Since its establishment in 1994, an education university in Hong Kong (which we will refer to as the University) has offered primarily teacher education to foster the development of quality teachers. To meet the demand for students’ holistic and whole-person development for the twenty-first century, the University has sought to broaden the range of programmes offered, introducing the concept of ‘Education-Plus’. Under the ‘Education-Plus’ vision, the University has been expanding non-education programmes rapidly since 2010. Many new A/T staff with limited teaching experience have been recruited, needing professional development (PD) to enhance their skills and knowledge. Since 2013, the Centre for Learning, Teaching and Technology (LTTC) has designed and developed an SPD programme to allow A/T staff to enrich their PD and ultimately enhance student learning. The evaluation of the current SPD programme activities revealed that the PD activities were beneficial to A/T’s teaching and their PD, but the question has arisen as to whether the current SPD programme is effective, e.g. whether A/T staff have obtained and applied new knowledge and skills to teaching. This paper will discuss the design of the current SPD programme and analyze its activities. The design outlined in ‘Three Stages of Professional Development: The Cycle of Change’ (Bellanca, 2009) will be referred to in order to develop an effective SPD programme. The paper will also design and propose a framework to evaluate the effectiveness of the SPD programme and its implementation cycle.

e-Portfolios are a form of authentic assessment with formative functions that include showcasing and sharing learning artifacts, documenting reflective learning processes, connecting learning across various stages and enabling frequent feedback for improvements. This paper examines how e-portfolios take up these formative roles to support productive learning. Qualitative findings from interviews with selected first-year undergraduate students at a higher education institution in Hong Kong are reported concerning students' experiences of constructing e-portfolios as assessment tasks. As part of an institutional teaching and learning initiative, e-portfolios were incorporated into three core courses for first-year students. The findings reveal that several conditions necessary to foster productive learning were missing in students' experiences: strengthened formative role of e-portfolios through coherent assessment design; encouragement for students' pursuit of authentic tasks to develop learning interests; engagement of students in reflective and self-regulative learning as an essential learning process; provision of constructive feedback for sustained learning support; and support for students' autonomy through facilitation of collaborative knowledge building. By explicating how the lack of these conditions impeded students' active involvement in e-portfolio tasks and suggesting relevant strategies for teachers at the institution in question, this paper offers implications for harnessing information and communication technology (ICT) to support students' productive learning.