In this Spotlight series we highlight experts in our team from across the globe. This week, the spotlight is on Jacqui Patten, Customer Success Manager. Even though Jacqui has a very distinct accent, she is in fact based in Western Australia and has been with PebblePad for 3 years.
What is your role at PebblePad and what is your background?
I’m the Western Australia consultant, Customer Success Manager. I started working with PebblePad in 2012 and when it was first being piloted at Edith Cowan University – I was on the project team that helped implement it.
My background is computer science and at ECU I had a few different roles working in the centre for learning and teaching. What I loved about PebblePad, it was easy to use, and you can really push the boundaries of what it can do.
What would you say you’re most passionate about in Higher Education?
It’s about helping students understand what they’ve learned. I went to university and did a computer science degree. As a graduate, I wasn’t particularly confident in my technical abilities. Looking back on it, I had learned a lot, and as soon as I got a job at a software company doing quality assurance, I realised I was particularly good at the human interaction skills. Of course, when I was a student there was no PebblePad to capture both the hard skills and soft skills required for work.
That’s why I’m passionate about the fact that when students leave university, they have their PebblePad alumni account. It’s a very rich resource, they can look back on it and see what they’ve learned over that course of that degree.
Are there any stand out moments?
My light bulb moment with PebblePad came when I was working at a university on a School of Nursing and Midwifery project. My role was to investigate a better way to log and manage placement activity. It’s the same in Australia as it is in the UK, students must complete and log; 100 antenatal visits, 100 postnatal visits and attend 20 births etc.
Student midwives must look after 20 women throughout the entirety of their pregnancy. This resulted in a huge amount of paperwork. Every visit required them to fill in a form, get it signed off, a photocopy, putting it in multiple portfolios for different experiences. It was a nightmare to organise and find documents as the paperwork and size of the folders grew very quickly.
I thought if we had two collections and one was tagged with each woman’s identifier and one was tagged with the experience type, you could log, count and collate them digitally at the same time.
With PebblePocket, students could complete forms on their phone, which would then automatically go into their portfolio in multiple places. That for me was a massive light bulb moment.
Although not specifically designed for midwifery, I knew that no other system would allow me to do this. No other sort of university systems had worked, which was quite a lot at that point. It was unique in that capacity for that discipline.
Finally, what do you love most about PebblePad?
It’s the versatility of it and the fact that you can make it do different things for different reasons, you can make it work for almost any context, any scenario and it works.
