I would like to personalize my courses by adding a welcome message which includes the name of the student that initiated the session, as retrieved from the LMS (Moodle 1.8). Is there any way to do this?

Hi, Anthony!
Unfortunately, no variable, that contains this information is available in current CourseLab version. The only way is to use custom JavaScript code.

It would be great if courselab did this - it would go a long way to making it a truly professional tool.

If you look at Lectora - that has a set of pre-defined variables based on SCORM data like this - it makes a good model.

There are lots of ways howevr that courselab is better than lectora.